


The Waking

by juniper__tree



Category: The Outer Worlds (Video Game)
Genre: Absurdism, Angst and Romance, Canon-Typical Violence, Depersonalization, Existential Angst, F/M, Hibernation sickness, Mild enemies to lovers, Pining, Religious Conflict, Sexual Content, Tachypsychia, Tactical Time Dilation, Weird Fluff, enlightenment
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:13:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 41,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25810405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/juniper__tree/pseuds/juniper__tree
Summary: In which the Vicar meets his match.Plans change, even Grand ones. So do people. Your captain on this flight is cryo-sick, dissociating, and might be dead. Prepare for turbulence.
Relationships: The Captain/Maximillian DeSoto
Comments: 69
Kudos: 81





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Vicar meets a stranger.

Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.  
— Camus

  
Whatever thin enticements Edgewater might yet offer for its residents, its paltry handful of disappointed and hasty visitors, the climate was not first among them. The preeminent adjective to describe the miasma which engulfed that edge of Emerald Vale was _salty._ _Sticky_ was a tight second place. It rolled in from the coast and the town was its first and favorite stop. 

The air—if it could be called such, though it shared no other qualities with that element than breathability, and that assessment, too, was debatable—clung and gathered in a soggy fog. It coagulated in puddles and soaked any chipped cobbles left to make up the roadways. And, worst of all its crimes, the fume met and mingled with that wretched stink sent up from the mechanized, oily, endless deconstruction of saltuna, the searing, metallic sealants of its cans. 

Hot fish and boiling aluminum and fetid salt spray. That was Edgewater. Maximillian DeSoto could not decide which was worse: the stench itself, or that he was growing accustomed to it. 

A vicar should not keep the doors to a vicarage closed, even to preserve some facsimile of untainted air for himself. So the air and the water and the salt and the stink drifted inside. And if no gauzy, weak ceremonial incense sold by the OSI suppliers could mask the smell, at least Max could clean. 

Salt preserved in bulk, but in small doses, it decayed. Salt was his enemy at the vicarage, and cleanliness both his weapon and his aim. The fog evaporated and left in its wake a mineral dust. Salt crusted along the bookshelf edges, inside the carved stars decorating the pew backs, and—most insultingly—around the smooth, curved tracks of planetary movement and slick stellar bodies laid into the floor in gold and stone. 

It was as though the salt grains set out to mimic the true stars, and scattered themselves among the representational sky. A foolish rejection of their purpose. They would only rot what they sought to touch, and leave nothing but black, empty holes. 

Max set to his tasks with vigor. He polished the shelves and pews to a shine. He wiped wet worker boot tracks from the wood and the woven runners. He scrubbed away the salt until he sweat through his vestments. The cassock did not breathe, which made him breathe all the harder. 

Keeping the vicarage clean was a constant fight against the effects of entropy. He often observed the irony—to himself, of course; no one else of his acquaintance could possibly understand—that an ordained vicar of the Order, a scholar of cosmology and physics, spent so many fucking hours working to stop an unstoppable law of the universe. Yet, it was the nature of energy to be expended. It was the Order's edict that one should work. 

Another observation Max would keep to his own counsel: he enjoyed it. Despite the wish forefront of his mind to save that energy for intellectual pursuits, there _was_ a fortification in it, a spirit-cleansing tiredness at the end. He reasoned to himself, on occasion, that he missed the regular exercise a tossball player was afforded, that which a scholar was largely forced to shun. What he could not reason away was a growing fear, half-glimpsed in conscious thought like a fleeting shadow. The fear that his body, that _he,_ was nothing but laborer stock, singularly suited for toil and sweat, and always would be. 

Fear was an emotional response. Irrational. The empirical evidence of his life did not support such inanity. He was a mind of no small note. His plans would make that note writ large. His path was set before him, and the truth was there to be found, to be deciphered, to be touched.

And so it was during one of these cleaning sessions, Max on his knees, salty and sticky with sweat, the heat under his cassock like a terrible, static cloud, that the stranger walked in. 

Workers who entered the church outside the appointed time for services soon found him, for confessions or counseling, or found an out of the way seat and sat, out of the way. If he was busy, and he always was, they were ignored, until they interrupted him, for which they received a stern, but measured, rebuke. The seminary provided its students perfect examples of how one's congregants, one's lessers, must be treated, for their own care, and the good of the economy. 

Workers did not, as a rule, walk upon flat, non-uniform boots to the center of the spherical system where a vicar may be scrubbing salt-marks from a marble moon, and stand expectantly. 

The stranger was a woman. She entered the church at a sleepwalker's pace, sedate and sluggish. 

Cold came in with her. The air changed and dropped. It was sharp and icy, it sliced through the hot humidity and crept its chilled fingers beneath his clothes, into his collar. Where did it come from? It was welcome. 

As was her presence. Cynical as he may have been, the rarity of a stranger's face, of a new set of thoughts and ideas to debate, was a precious commodity, more valuable to him than bits. Less so than his own desire for a truth he could not yet grasp. And there, he thought, she may be of use. Any stranger in the Emerald Vale had to be of an adventuring type.

Max might have been contented and eased by the familiar, settled by its steady knowability. Knowing, after all, was his vocation, and, while undecipherable as yet, the Grand Plan could be seen and known, in a fashion. But his heart had always been restless. A scholar could not remain content with the known. It was the unknown which reached its own cold hands toward the mind and yearned to be explored. To be thoroughly penetrated. It demanded one's attention, one's _obsession,_ though it rarely did so with direct action. 

Apparently, it shuffled slow and nonchalant through the door, stood silent, and surveyed the space. 

He wiped his forehead and sat back on his heels. "An outsider? Fantastic." 

He could not stop the hungry smile which split his face. He'd been told more than once he had the look of a lecher. It _was_ only a look. His appetites lay far above the baser insticts, though he was still hale and virile, hardly immune to demands of the body. The want of that secret knowledge was so much stronger than any physical pull. Yet... he allowed himself to linger over her person, this new and mysterious sight, while he waited for her to speak. 

A wide face curtained by long, black masses of thick hair. A wide, sturdy frame—or what appeared to be so beneath a flightsuit flanked by tubes and dials the likes of which he'd never seen. What he could surmise of her figure was, he acknowledged with some frustration, to his liking. A wide mouth, full and also appealing, he had to admit, though it remained firmly shut. 

"Are you here for..." He looked her over once more. "Confession?"

It was only then that her eyes fell upon his own. That she noticed his existence. The eyes, they were black and flat as the volcanic rock which bordered the Vale's famous, deadly lava flow. They gave off a similar air, of both caution and allure: one should not wander too close, and yet one is compelled to do just that.

She shook her head. The eyes said nothing. It was not the deadened stare of a worker. It was far more peculiar.

He ventured more conversation. “Then, perhaps you could help me.” 

The wide, dark eyes blinked. They were dull as old coins. Like in a mimeograph of an old-world book he'd seen at seminary—they unearthed the coins from burials, from the dead of a millennia or more ago. Something about her put him in mind of the ancient, of the aged. Here, in this colony where nothing was much older than his grandparents’ graves. 

“How?” she asked, the first word her heard her speak. It was coarse and low, raw as a plague-struck throat. Drifting, even with one word, over a thorny patch of vague inflections. The cold was in her voice. It was spectral. 

For a moment, he regretted engaging her. A moment, only. 

"Forgive me." He tossed the rag and pushed himself from the floor, swallowing a groan at straightening his bent, sore knees. Thirty-second-backs did not remain thirty-second-backs forever. "Vicar Maximillian DeSoto, at your service." 

Standing, he had to look up, slightly, to meet her eyes. 

"Forgive me," she echoed. From her mouth, it was a robotic copy. As though she had forgot how to speak, and was forced to assimilate as she went. "I just woke up."

"And you are?" Max set to unrolling his damp cassock sleeves with careful precision, so he that he would not stare while she plumbed her clearly clouded mind for an answer, while she absently licked her dry, pale lips. 

She blinked again. "They told me I am Captain Alex Hawthorne." 

He dared to smirk, to chuckle at her confusion, though by verity he could not help it. To one so firmly possessed of his own mind, his sense of self, the idea of its absence was both horrible and amusing in equal fashion. One had to laugh. "Did they tell you the truth?" he asked, in his most indulgent vicar-voice.

The stranger's hair fluttered like a dark-leafed tree as she tilted her head just so. "Does it matter?" 

"Truth always matters, young lady." Max was no longer inclined to be indulgent. "It is all that matters."

Her mouth twitched at that. A flash of something he could not read—humor, recognition—in those black eyes. At last, some human movement from her. 

"What do you want?" she asked. 

The help he sought. If Max were anything other than desperate, he might walk back that wanting and leave her to whatever odd future awaited her. But he had been thwarted and denied, for far too long. Desperation was at the heart of his asking a stranger for what he, to his shame but not surprise, could not manage himself. Desperation led him to Edgewater, and worse places before that. It fueled him.

He calmly asked her for that thing which suffused him with angry urgency. He gave her the instructions which would help him unlock the unknown.

At his request, she merely shrugged. “All right.” And that was it. His disappointment shocked him.

He wanted more from her. Perhaps he was lecherous, in a way. For those secrets in the universe which had yet to reveal themselves. For anyone who could lead him closer to the truth, whether those leading fingers were warm or frozen, alive or dead. 

She left without another word. Her sleepy steps were near silent. Max watched her walk out of the dim, blue quiet of the church, into the damp bright of the town, where beyond the door the sun warmed those sea-salt pools in the walkways, gleamed over the workings of the saltuna cannery, and baked all it touched, so that the stench and heat rose up and smothered. She disappeared into the light. 

But inside, her cold remained. The air was different—better, because anything was better, but unsettled. Unsettling. 

He had not asked her why she came, or where she wandered from. If she ever returned... The unknown beguiled him. The unknown now encompassed her. 

Max put that unknown aside, for the moment. He breathed in her cold air. It touched his lungs, his hot, restless heart. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which nanners are eaten and truths are told.

I find myself regarding existence as though from beyond the tomb, from another world; all is strange to me...  
— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

  
\---

  
  
_Universal Defense Logistics ID UDL-002-482165-J23_  
_Evangeline Valancy Brook_  
_Beverage Service Technician_  
_Natal date: 2252_  
_Net value: 476.1_  
_Stasis class: D_  
  


So read the scuffed-edged, laminate-peeling placard the stranger left lying upon the floor of the cold captain's quarters, discarded among empty ammunition packs and a decidedly dull array of stray, torn underthings. 

Her face stared out from the flat plastic, eyes so unreadable they might as well be closed. 

The stranger—Miss Brook— _did_ return to the vicarage, Miss Holcomb the mechanic hiding behind her like a scared, sullen sprat. And she _did_ provide him with precisely that cryptic, handwritten book for which he asked. The less Max recalled that particular hideous disappointment, the better for his knife's-edge nerves. The less he considered and counseled himself over which of his many failures, his abundant errors in judgment, led to this Law-forsaken state of misfortune, the easier it would be to continue on the path to ultimate understanding, as opposed to throwing someone out an airlock.

Desperation, again. That was what surged through him, dangerous an overheated cannery works, bolt-seams steaming and red, and propelled him forward.

Goodbye, Edgewater, and good riddance. Welcome to the Unreliable. 

The change would have been altogether more stirring and sensory had the ship also propelled, with even half the heat his mind mustered. Max bolted the church and boarded in haste, bunked down in an empty berth and set to sorting his things. A desk and lamp, his books, and the OSI banner unfurled above him, declaring the room its own miniature vicarage. Then he waited—for takeoff, for the trip to the Groundbreaker. 

The Unreliable sat in her dry dock for another three weeks. 

Miss Brook explained that she—the ship, of course—was not yet space-worthy, and there was quite the entanglement set before her—the captain, that is—which must be unraveled before they could leave the Vale. Though Miss Brook was far less verbose than he, in his recollection. She gave a languid gesture in approximate direction of the engine room, slow-blinked her dark eyes, and said simply, "Busted." 

The rest he pieced together from Miss Holcomb and that AI navigator. 

Should he have helped her pick through that web of problems to speed the process? Should he have stayed in Edgewater to minister to the workers until departure was imminent? The fact is, Max did neither. A new OSI appointee would take his abandoned post in due course, the matter being entirely the purview and responsibility of Mr. Tobson and the bishop in Byzantium. As for assisting Miss Brook... 

It would not be inaccurate to say he was curious as to her comportment, and her capability. By verity, he was eager to fly. And yet. If he were to be a part of her complement, she should know his scholarship surpassed all other so-called responsibilities. _He_ should know what kind of captain, what kind of woman, she was.

Therefore he stayed aboard, alone. He read, and wrote. He fried nanner sandwiches on stale bred in the lonely galley and lamented the lack of cups in the cupboard. He attempted, in vain, to will himself to spontaneously understand French. 

And he snooped.

The meager, engine-greased smattering of stuff Miss Holcomb owned was of no interest to Max, and picking through it all only confirmed that fact. A few wrinkled photographs, a few fading flowers. Nothing personal or provocative to hold his attention. The rest of the berths were empty. The engine room and nav held nothing but dull machines, the AI included. The galley was sorely bereft of any liquor worth the headache. 

That left only the captain's quarters which he had not explored. Purely the last room on the list. It was, no doubt, the 2-Hour Energy Brew he drank in the morning that set his heart to thumping as he slid open the door beneath his hands. 

Tea and smoke. The scents commingled, they overwhelmed. That deeply steeped tripicale sourness. The spiced wood-burn acridity he recognized, pointedly a Cosmic residue. Together they met sweetly at first, then devolved into a stale stain in the air. It smelled, frankly, like prison. 

This room was colder than the rest. The air did not move. Briefly, Max imagined himself in a terrible aetherwave serial—he was an intrepid freelancer trespassing into a derelict, junked ship, whose poor passengers were long since dead and frozen in their beds.

Miss Brook's bed was simple, as in the rest of the rooms, but she had more floorspace—not that the floor could be spied past the absolute havoc of the place. Tattered and trashed armor pieces, cracked helmets spattered with dried blood, exploded gun parts shadowed by dark powder burns. The empty ammo boxes, the tangled morass of undergarments, more than he had ever seen in one location together. 

Three overflowing dishes of spent and burnt butts by the bedside. A collection of mugs half-filled and fearsome to peer inside of. So, that's where all the cups had gone. 

For the second time since making Miss Brook's acquaintance, regret shivered through Max. He shook it off in an instant and could not, even a moment later, recall what had prompted such a ridiculous state. He gathered up the cups and plates at arm's length and ferried them to the galley sink. He did not think she would notice their absence for the rest of the mess. 

She was slovenly and chaotic. What did that matter to Max? He did not have to like her. He had only to convince her to take him where he needed to go. So far as he had seen, she was as malleable as a pile of mud, and the convincing was easy. Almost unnecessary. She did not seem to care _what_ she did. 

She—Miss Holcomb reported, for he was not present to witness—undertook random acts of what appeared to be compassionate kindness, and then performed an opposite action, undoing the good done for no benefit to herself. "She don't seem cruel, Vicar, more like she don't think at all one way or the next," Miss Holcomb whispered, and worried at a grease-stained thumbnail. 

In other words, no internal logic. One had to make choices with reason. Reason was the lamplight which showed one their path. So many pathless, Lawless transgressors were over-swayed by emotion, and paid the price for ignoring reason. The captain, paradoxically, ignored both. She felt nothing and thought nothing. 

Max found her to be a vexing person. 

Sometimes, Miss Brook and her young charge would return for a day or a night. Sometimes, it was only Miss Brook, and she and Max were alone—together—on the quiet, stationary ship. 

Max might enter the galley and find her at the table, slumped low in a chair. One half-peeled nanner in her hand, she took tentative, experimental bites. A vague distaste clouded her face, and she left the room, unhurried but decidedly green. The nanner abandoned, uneaten. 

He might surreptitiously catch a glimpse of her face through a high bulkhead arch opening, or an open porthole window-way. If she ever noticed his nearness, she didn't show it. She stared out, blank as unprinted pulp, that full mouth just open and barely breathing. She stood unmoving for minutes, a trance state which locked her limbs in place and petrified her mind. So it seemed to him. And then—a slow blink, a straightening of her shoulders, and she was back to normal. 

Or however near such a woman could come to that evaluation. 

  
\---

  
The second venture he made into her room, he found the identification placard. Its damaged laminate glimmered in the late sunlight which fell upon her floor, between a light pistol chunked into scrap and a strappy, graying brassiere. There was her photographed face, strange but alluring in its way. There was her name, and so much more. 

To call the card, and what it said, _baffling_ would be an understatement. Universal Defense Logistics oversaw the Board, but he could not fathom Miss Brook as a Board agent, or spy. She would be the most ineffective, ostentatiously odd person they might choose—and clearly uncommitted to her duties. A beverage service technician, by Law.

If this data was correct, that would make her over one hundred years old. An impossibility. An absurdity. 

He was not prepared, not at all, to make a journey with such disturbing Board connections. The Board would hear of Bakonu's journal, and of his future destinations, his efforts to translate it. The Board had a direct and mutual line to OSI hierarchy. Their knowledge was shared. If they were aware of his current state of Philosophist-adjacent blasphemy, greater good though it may serve in the end, he was fucked. Again. 

And if she were not of the Board? Though one may need to bend a small truth now and then in order to find a larger one, liars should be sensible and skilled. A low-rent con artist might mistype her false papers and accidentally age herself into oblivion. He was not in the habit of consorting with the low-rent, the unskilled, or the foolish. He was not very much inclined to begin to do so.

Max approached her with the card, his confusion and _need_ to know vibrating through him, the next time he found her at the long galley table. She leaned over an open sack of plain Tileritos, her thick, dark hair an opaque veil. She attempted one, small bite of a chip corner. Her teeth flashed, then her mouth closed tight. The rest of the chip was dropped, discarded. 

"Oh," she said, when he placed the placard in her cool, pale palm. "That." 

He huffed. "Miss Brook, I underst— I _respect_ your privacy and I would never violate it without due cause. You are a stranger to me and I am merely your passenger. But for the sake of shipwide fidelity, for the ease of the journey, I must know whether you work for the Board, or UDL." 

She opened her mouth to speak, then let out a slow sigh. She looked at the card, and then at Max. "Didn't I tell you?"

"You told me nothing, Miss Brook." It was rather like confessions with the canners. Slow-witted and circular. He would have closed his eyes until it were over—had he not been so eager to see if any recognition might flit across that face which beguiled him despite its blankness, those eyes which somehow drew him in, though they were flat and lifeless as stones. 

"This." She held the card up in the muted, white shiplight. "It came with me from the Hope." Though it was not difficult to parse the puzzlement which surely colored his face, he was still mildly impressed she was able. "Do you know about the Hope?" she asked, in that low, cold voice. 

"The old story? That ship never arrived, and they never found it, it's..." He brushed his now-damp palms against his cassock. "It's a story," he said sharply. 

"Someone found it. I was frozen there. He unfroze me." Miss Brook pocketed the placard. 

"Do you really expect me to believe that _you_ are a lost colonist?" Max paced, fists tight at his sides, and his steps were stomps. He was losing control. "That you're _one hundred and three years old_ and _the only one_ who walked out of a ghost ship?"

Her death-white hands were flat on the table. "The only one," she repeated, that mechanical echo.

A heated growl escaped him. He stopped in place and unclenched his fists. The reality of the matter was becoming quite obvious. She was no spy and no swindler. She was insane. 

He could work with that. 

He began to excuse himself, to remove to his room and recalibrate his strategies with this new knowledge, but politeness was pointless. She was entranced again, by whatever implausible intrusion stole her attention away. He left her to her dreams, and imagined they must be superior to her waking life.

  
\---

  
It should have been a short flight to the Groundbreaker, but the Unreliable lived up to her name. 

The ship sputtered and lurched through dead space, and stopped altogether—only to spin into slow action again. Miss Holcomb spent all her hours, sleeping or otherwise, in the engine room, tending to its whines and whims. They would, she promised Max, arrive in one healthy piece, "if'n it might be slow-goin' while she wakes." 

The ship and her captain seemed perfectly matched. 

Max had known many insane people, most of them on Tartarus. One, he even loved, if love might be described as clinging to anything which freed his mind from the pain of imprisonment, a distraction in the form of a woman. A distraction which becomes a habit, a habit which turns into obsession. 

Zelene was a teammate, a hacker who impressed him with her rage. Her wildness, her insanity, encouraged him let loose that violent enthusiasm which had been his shame—both on the field and in her narrow bunk. It was liberating, for a time, and he sank into that wild darkness for lack of any better option. 

But obsession always fades, into misty recollection that seems to stem from another life, someone else's life. He worked diligently, after enough time spent in the Labyrinth, to focus that enthusiasm into scholarship, into his faith.

For example, when a fellow freed prisoner on the shuttle back to Terra 2 reported Zelene died some months prior to that trip, in a fatal tossball tussle, Max could hardly muster her face in his memory. 

Miss Brook was a very different sort of woman. Calm, though with her imposing figure and anarchic nature, he doubted she was harmless. Intriguing, like the subject of an experiment, because she was so disturbingly strange. Enraging, since—despite his acknowledgment of her clearly addled brain—he had some instinct that her absurd decisions were intentional. That she _had_ the sense all decent Scienticians were born with, and simply chose to let it lie dormant. 

And he would find the proof of it, one way or another. 

The last time Max snuck into the captain's quarters, he determined to hack into her terminal. He tiptoed around broken bullet packs and bloodied boots. The machine was hardly locked—a simple crack and it let him in. And for even that minor trouble, the prize was slim: notes on schemes and piracy, a stash of love-struck twaddle from an obviously besotted Board rep, all for Alex Hawthorne, the man she said she wasn't. So who was Evangeline Brook?

He was exiting to the terminal root when a scuttle shook behind him, a tremble in the air. He spun sharp on his heel. 

There she was, and there she had been all the while. Cross-legged and cramped in her bunk, threadbare blanket shawled across her shoulders. Watching him, wordless—or not. He could scarcely tell what those flat, black eyes were up to. 

"Miss Brook." What should have been an apology left his mouth as an admonishment. So rarely did he utter any contrition that it was not a shocking mistake. He was far out of practice. "You might have told me you were there." 

She blinked and blinked, but the eyes stayed blank. "I didn't see you," she said, langurous, at a loss, as though each word had to be unearthed from the dark. "Time... slips away from me. Sometimes. I can't think. I'm sorry." She turned her glassy-eyed stare to meet his. 

Now she was sorry in his stead. Sorry for his own bad behavior, his doubt and distrust. Oh, it galled him. It needled him, how weak she was in that moment. The weak were not to be pitied. 

Max stepped toward her, but he stubbed his foot on a cracked corporate helmet. It barely hurt, yet his hot outrage mounted. He hooked his fingers around its open visor, like a stick net trapping a tossball, and hurled it across the room. It bounced off the closed lid of a bin, and shuddered down the wall with a plastic scrape. 

She didn't even flinch. 

He picked up more: one stray boot, black underpants, a flat bottle of Lemon Slapp. He carried them to the bin through the piles of junk, kicked the lid open, and dropped it all in its dark, empty recess. "Oh, there's plenty you should be sorry for, Miss Brook. This sloppy disorder you live in. How Law-damned slow you are." Max scraped up more clutter and deposited it, hard, in the bin with each recrimination. "The blasphemous way you flout logic. How little sense you make."

Soon there was more floor to be seen, less mess. Soon he stood panting and angry beside her bed, where the tea and the smoke lingered. "You may be sorry for all that," he told her, his voice black, "but don't you dare be sorry for me." 

She lit a cigarette, in case the smell wasn't strong enough. "You misunderstand me." She said it like she'd said it a thousand times. Like it was her lot in life, a never-ending explanation. 

Max wiped a bead of sweat from his upper lip. "I would say that is evident."

Miss Brook pulled the blanket tighter around her. "I'm sick all the time," she said. "I can't eat. I hardly sleep. Time makes no sense, it isn't me. I'm not me." The slow, cold shadow that was her usual tone heated, and sped with earnest distress. "He said it would get better. It hasn't."

"Who?" he asked. 

"The man who found me. I—" She hissed a sigh. "I can't even remember his name. ADA knows it. He wants me to help him with the others, the ones left on the Hope, but I can't do anything right. I don't belong here." 

Something in her changed. Her eyes changed, so deep and lucid and genuine. Flashing with pain and dread. She was awake, fully. He understood now why she fascinated him. His mouth went dry. 

"You were telling the truth, weren't you?" Somehow the most absurd explanation was the only one which fit.

Miss Brook nodded and smoked. 

He leaned on one arm against the bunk frame. "I don't understand," he muttered. "It's been so long. How are you alive?" 

She turned her clear, dark eyes to him. "I'm not sure I am." 

Max scoffed. He swept aside a formless lump of fabric with his foot, and sat upon the floor. And how did he find himself, again, lowered before her, studying the black tumult of her hair and her opulent figure? Hidden though it was, he knew it now, even in armor. He had always been too observant for his own good. 

He did not like her, as much for her peculiarity as her strain on his sense of order, his insistent demand to _know._ Yet he felt himself becoming lenient. It was the vicar in him, such as he could perform that role. 

"Do you remember anything? From before?" he asked. 

She stared out at the space, the stars, beyond her round triple-window. "A little. I remember things about home." She snuffed her cigarette into another full plate. "Waves," she said. "Salt. The smell. Like your town."

He hated that. It was not his town and certainly not his smell. Of course she would think of it fondly. Of course.

"Do you remember why you became a colonist?"

She only shrugged, and squirmed in the bed. "No, and it doesn't matter now. I'm not even that anymore." 

The blanket moved. One soft, dimpled thigh showed. Max couldn't take his eyes off the curve of it. It was inevitable—the heat started in his head as anger, and in the rest of his body it became something else entirely. He should avoid both. They would not serve him.

But he imagined, a rapid reel of thoughts, how that thigh might feel—beneath his clawed fingers, between his teeth. 

He did not like her. Must that be a prerequisite? He would think on that, later, in his own bunk. 

Miss Brook stared on, without notice. And he imagined, too, the black of her eyes shining, reflecting that starfield. He didn't dare look. He turned away, to lean back against the cold bedframe, and stare, the way she did. 

"You want to be back there, don't you? On the Hope?" He asked it gently as he could manage. 

There was a sound from her, a dark hum which thrummed through him. "Part of me has to be there."

That was an answer Max should have expected. He should expect frustration and impatience from himself, oddities from her. He was a selfish, greedy man, there was no denying that, yet all he demanded was knowledge. What he was given was perplexity. Surely something had misaligned in his mathematics, a misstep in his path, to let himself drift so far. 

"We can't go backward," he said, as much to himself as to her. We can only progress, with grace, and view the path behind us with patience. We are where we belong. We can't go backward. 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which uncommon creatures find each other.

Life swarms with innocent monsters.  
— Charles Baudelaire

Roseway Gardens—abandoned, bereft of commerce or tourism, empty and quiet, once one dispatched the roaming raptidons. Ignoring the corpses, it was a prettier town for all that, perhaps because of, not despite, its emptiness. Far from the salt-air shore and the volcano heat which plagued other parts of Terra 2, the gray sky was cool. The deep reds and greens of the buildings set against that sky, overhung with ivy vine, were soothing to the eye. Particularly to an eye stuck so long staring at the sickly yellow and sea blue of Edgewater, of everything Spacer's Choice. 

Max would not admit it among laborers—clergy were discouraged from evincing corporate preference aloud—but he had a fondness for Auntie Cleo. The aromatics and ointments were top notch, certainly, but give him a roasted tobaccorn ear drenched in finely-aged Catch-Up, and he was a happy consumer. 

He had, at one time, applied for a post in another Auntie Cleo township, and been denied. Perhaps the practiced recitation of his favoritism before their Board representative sounded just that: too practiced, too favoring. It didn't matter, in the end. After Tartarus, his only desired vicarship was that seaside void. 

As a consolation, the Edgewater post left him free to bemoan the Darlings' perpetually pathetic performances, without looking over his shoulder. 

Both shoulders, now, were clear of such frivolous concerns. One balanced the hot end of a sawed-off shotgun. The other, he did peek over time to time, to watch for rapts or marauders. To ensure the intrepid Captain Brook had not slipped into one of her sleepy spells, right there along the broken roads through Roseway.

She was still insensate much of the time, her mind still muddied and murky. Her choices... Well, they tried one's patience. She would spend as long on the trail of some no-account outlaw's lucky cigarette case—left and lost in a pit of raptidons, though that was an apt descriptor for the region as a whole—as she might to do what was _necessary._ And that would be any job she'd been tasked with which would move her ship, and by extension himself, far from Edgewater, from Roseway, from Terra 2.

He had a question for her, each time she took on a new, and ever more dangerous, job: "Oh, Miss Brook, do you know what you're doing?" 

She never answered.

Max asked it so often aloud that it grew to annoy even the obliging Miss Holcomb. So he kept it in his own head, after a time.

He had a second question: each day he would ask, he would approach a demand, he would come near to Law-forsaken _begging,_ to go to Monarch. Her answers to this were vague shrugs, a benign wave of her hand, a blank, meaningless smile. 

One could only remain patient for so long, and he needed practice. He swallowed his irritation and kept composure. She helped him with the book, with the security data from the Mardets. Assistance from him was a fair exchange of labor for services rendered, though barter was a primitive economic practice, to his mind. He said he would be a shiphand, a gunhand, spiritual counsel. He tried to be all these things to her, though she never asked him for anything. She did not seem to _want_ anything.

She didn't even try to make her way toward her lost colony ship, with the rest of her frozen kind.

Miss Holcomb was right. The captain veered violently between kindness and cruelty. Maybe more indifference, flighty offhand impulses. 

When that hysterical, pompous prig of a doctor asked her to rescue a man _he_ left to die, trapped among the rapts, she led them with haste to find him. Which they did, after slaughtering a dozen or more of the monsters, facing injury and poison and the specter of permanent scarring through the broken-down, cobbled-together armor Miss Brook had given to Max. 

And when they found the trapped man? One word from him the captain didn't like, then she tossed him a jammed pistol and left him to his fate. What was it all _for,_ then? Her only response was to purse those full lips, give Max her best attempt at a thoughtful look, empty as it appeared to him, and say, "He talked too much."

As if intellect and vocabulary were criminal. 

He hypothesized it must have been some residual effect of the cryogenics. That outlaw scientist told her as much—that her brain processed time differently now. Max was unsure it was processing at all. 

He'd entered Dr. Welles' asteroidal outpost by her side, to keep watch on her as well as eavesdrop, while he poked among the mystifying experiments Welles conducted. He gleaned from the terminal logs that Miss Brook was another one: a trial met with success. Mostly. 

For whatever it was worth to her, or to Welles, Max was supportive of their enterprise. If this man, who was truly insane—unlike Miss Brook who seemed, to put it charitably, only confused—if he could avoid Board inquiry and apprehension for so long, then Max would fall in with their lot, and not a word of complaint would leave his lips. At least, he would try to keep them shut.

Somehow the solemnity of his state failed to register with him strongly in the moment, as it happened. Desperation did that to a man. But the fact was undeniable. He had thrown away his vicarship on a chance. A chance to prove something, to be the one to make the greatest discovery for his faith in ages. If that meant traipsing and trailing behind a discombobulated woman, he would do that. If it meant shotgunning raptidons at an uncomfortably close range, he would do that, too. He would do anything. 

He needed space to find the truth, and now he had it. He was unmoored, floating like that asteroid, like the directionless Unreliable. There must be a thing, a person, a mission, he could grab hold of, to anchor him before he slipped from the path completely. 

  
\---

  
It took little time for Max to gather that his instinctive response to Miss Brook was unique. 

The others liked her. The silly hooligan she'd picked up from the Groundbreaker, Millstone, found her amusing, and an unfortunate inspiration for his own poor morals. Miss Holcomb held her in some regard, esteem even, now that she had "got used to her funny ways." Of course, the mechanic spent most of her time apart from Miss Brook, with the engine and AI for company. Only Max burned with vexation to be around her, lightly tinted though it was with pity for her predicament. 

This supercilious Dr. Crane was, bizarrely, another fan of the captain. 

Yes, Max could admit she was arresting at first glance, and a few glances after. Yes, there was something of the serial heroine about her when she removed her helmet with a sigh, shook out her stormful dark hair, and the lab light shone in the spare sweat along her nose, her alabaster brow. "You saved my life," the doctor gushed at her. His gaze went gooey. Miss Brook turned away without a sound, and the goo followed her about the room. 

What a sad specimen. The man was lucky to have no real knowledge of her temperament, her tastes. This laboratory lightweight would not last one day on the Unreliable with her. And if silver hair and a silver tongue were all it took to win favor, Max would be well on his way to the bishopdom by now. Surely no toothpaste-squeezer was going to catch her eye—not when that eye was glazed and depthless as a prefab faux window.

He had a notion to poke her about the doctor's regard as they passed through the town doors and into the wilds, to see if his read on her dispassion was right. He was formulating in his mind just the right question to bedevil her, if such a thing could be done, when they were ambushed. 

Marauders and their canids hit at the team from every side, snarling and shooting. Max dropped behind a stack of shipping crates and wrangled his helmet on. It was too tight on his ears and nose, not to mention his hair, but better disheveled than dead. 

Bullets and lasers cracked the air, and Max hauled himself up to join them. He took down two marauders in minutes, his shotgun steady, each shell weighted with purpose and faith. Millstone jumped into the fray, clear of obstructions, and left himself wide open for attack. But the spread of his gun, and the bodies which crumpled lifeless around him, ensured he was in less danger than he looked. 

Max lost sight of Miss Brook in the melee, but the effect of her gun was clear. Between the three of them, marauders fell in dead heaps, the canids splayed gutted and bloody in the grass. The rush of violence drummed through him, pulsing and hot. Some part of him was made for this, he knew. It came so naturally. And that was the part he must deny, excepting times such as these, when his rage might be put to good use.

The heated frenzy went icy in an instant. Miss Brook, in a far corner of his vision, knocked to the ground with a stomach-turning thud, with a fearful scream he never imagined could come from her throat. He bolted toward the sounds, where a lone marauder loomed over her prone body, where a canid crawled on top of her. 

He ran through wild weeds, and his mind ran, too, through a quick succession of thoughts. If she died now, he would never know what kind of person she honestly was, once the fog of her freezing sickness subsided. Assuming it ever did. Would anyone fight him for control of her ship? He didn't think so. They would lose, regardless. And, oh yes, most central to the current situation: he did not want to see a canid rip out her throat. He didn't want her harmed, or worse. 

Max racked the action and fired. The shells split the marauder's patchy vest, and thick blood spewed from its back, arcing in the air. The body dropped, inanimate, to the ground. He reloaded and readied the gun, when he heard another sound. 

Miss Brook was laughing.

He struggled out of his helmet and dumped it at his feet. "What the fuck?"

The canid had flattened her, its hard claws on her armored chest. But there was no tearing into her jugular or any other beastly maneuver. It licked at her cheeks, her round chin. And she laughed, tickled. 

That laugh—it was big and hoarse. It was another noise he couldn't have imagined. It was too genuine, too ferocious. If a canid laughed, it might sound similar. Perhaps that's what attracted the creature. Two mutants, altered irrevocably for the worse by science. Max could only stare.

She kept the damn thing, and everyone hated it. 

"Well, I suppose it's nice to have companionship," Miss Holcomb cogitated aloud, though she squeaked and ran whenever it came within ten yards of her person. Millstone said it smelled like a Back Bay toilet tank. As for Max... this was beyond rational reasoning. This was only further proof of her derangement.

Canid waste, they learned the hard way, was corrosive. It would have burned holes in the Unreliable hull. That was the one saving grace of the disturbing automechanical maid she turned on—it cleaned without complaint. 

She fed the monster by hand, with cut up sprat, though it ate anything it could reach. She would devolve into one of her trances, and it sat at her feet, licking the leftovers from her fingers. 

The whole scenario disgusted Max. He contemplated shooting it, and telling her it ran off if she asked, like some hokey, overbearing pioneer father in a aether tale. But he was not that cruel. He was not cruel at all. 

  
\---

  
The ship flew back to the Groundbreaker, and the crew gathered around the kitchen table, talking of nothing. 

From behind a book he made best efforts to read— _The Order and the Chaos, or How the Eternal Equation Reveals the Natural Order of the Cosmos,_ a gift of poetry from Miss Brook's endless looting—Max observed her. It was what a scientist would do, and what a Scientician must.

She made her own steady effort at draining a bottle of Purpleberry Wine. Her lips always looked cold, a pale bluish hue, so they took readily to the residue of the wine, a plum-dark stain. 

So, wine on an empty stomach didn't make her sick? The rest of us should be so lucky. By her account, her inability to properly eat, or sleep, continued to plague her. The shadows beneath her eyes grew purple as the wine, and echoed in her cheeks. There was an air of ethereality about Miss Brook. Solid and tall as she was, at times he fancied she was moments from fading into smoke, like she had never been there in the first place.

Of course, there was the inflamed, red rash sprung up across her cheek and neck—surely an effect of her canid's slobbering devotion—which marred, somewhat, that ghostly look.

While the crosstalk crossed over him, young Millstone telling ridiculous tales from his delinquent days on the Groundbreaker, Miss Holcomb snorting and giggling, he noticed—Miss Brook laughed, too, a subdued, scratchy version of that wild howl he heard. Her eyes were bright. One might say they _sparkled,_ if one were so inclined.

So, the wine worked for that, too? From his tallying, there were two ways to wake her from that ever-present mental slumber: get angry with her, and put her in harm's way. Now he could add, get her drunk. Well, that made her _someone's_ ideal woman. 

Her face flushed with the drink, which meant there was real blood in her veins. She took off her jacket, down to sleeveless vest, and folded her arms. They were plump and pale, round-shouldered, white enough to see those veins of hers. Her fingers pressed into her own soft flesh, the way a lover's might. Max idly dragged a nail along the book's leather cover and wondered... Was there a fourth way to wake her? 

He moved his eyes back to the book. He kept reading the same Law-damned stanza over and over. 

Millstone overboiled a pot of purloined pasta from Roseway, and Miss Holcomb jumped to rescue it, laughing. Miss Brook watched, wide-eyed and charmed as though it were the latest comedy-saga on the aether. The canid was, as it should be, somewhere else. It favored the SAM unit's charging pod for sleeping quarters. Perhaps even such a creature disdained the captain's chaos of a room—or it had a strange affection for the mechanical, since it gathered up the monster's messes.

Talk among the crew was affable and easy. Only Max didn't fit, silent and surly with his book, casting a judgmental quirk of his brow at each silly statement. He didn't mean to be harsh. He didn't mean to keep himself apart. Yet— He was an ordained representative of the Order. He _was_ apart, and above. 

No one in any of the miserable towns he'd been posted in ever asked where anyone was from, or what they did before. They did what they do. They were from where they are. That was the way things went. A man might determine his own future, but acceptance of his circumstances was part of that determination. Moving, yearning, striving—these were antipodal to the teachings of his seminary. Yet these notions formed the entire pattern of his life. He was a contradiction—no, a heretic. 

Was this how all heretics felt: unheretical? Faithful, even, in their desires which seemed so vile and violent to the ways the Church established? Did they feel vindicated by their own designs, and misunderstood by the masses? It could be none of them had ever gone far enough to prove their point. _He_ would not be called a heretic when it was all said and done. They wouldn't dare.

Max closed the book, the stanzas still unread, and retreated to his room, to be rid of the noise, and those thoughts. 

Some moments later there was a muted knock against his shut door. It was Miss Brook. 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which rashes, and other tendernesses, spread. 

  
Great Nature has another thing to do  
To you and me.  
— Theodore Roethke

  
There were times the flat, black circularity of Miss Brook's eyes appeared empty, as though she were only a mask, and they were holes through which one spied the thick, burned cloud of her hair. No one watched from the other side. 

But there were also times—now, for instance, as she leaned in Max's doorway, jacketed again but still flush-faced—that her eyes flashed with dimension and depth. With purpose. It was hard to look away.

"I was thinking..." she began in that breathy, ragged voice.

"Truly? I'm surprised." Max couldn't help himself. 

The only sign she'd even heard his sarcastic tweak was her slow blink, a creased brow. "Could you read to me? Tell me about your church?" Her white, bruised hands brushed all that dark, draping hair behind her ears. "I don't know. It might—" She searched for the words. "Might help me remember. We must have had this on Earth." 

He scoffed. "Of course you did. This is the only faith for humanity. Anything else must be lost to superstitious antiquity."

She bit at her purple lip. 

So she asked him for something. A thing he was eminently capable of providing. Glad to. He was committed to his faith. He would never deny his counsel to a wayward lamb, certainly not one in need of guidance toward spiritual correction. 

He sat her on his bed, turned his desk chair to face her, and began to recite the basic beliefs, things he'd stated thousands, millions of times. Things which were a part of him now. He spoke of the Grand Architect, the Universal Equation, reason—and she listened, meek and quiet as a worker in a pew. 

Conceivably, it was because those beliefs were written so deep in his memory that his concentration strayed. He spoke with easy authority, but his thoughts went elsewhere. Mainly, they studied the heated, red rash which split her face. It began just under her nose, slashed beside her lip, then drew down over her chin, along her neck. 

It was something like the weird whim which made her adopt the canid in the first place—if one thought she was merely a soft, sleepy beauty unscarred by time and trial, one should think again. 

He closed his eyes with a sigh. "Miss Brook, I cannot continue this way. It's your face, this—" He gestured, angry, toward her. "This _plague_ your new pet has given you. It is entirely distracting. You know the damned thing is poisonous, don't you?" 

The captain raised a hand to her cheek. "Oh," was all she said. 

"If you'll allow me?" He opened the berth storage and felt in the dark among his neatly organized items. He knew precisely where he kept it without sight: Auntie Cleo's Facial Masque Skin Crème. 

The idea that some people could not care for themselves was anathema to a good Scientician. The weak perished, in this world, in any world. This woman, however... she had ample excuse for helplessness. Max did not think her utterly incompetent. Far from it—she had done every single thing he ever saw her set out to do, and with aplomb. That, at least, was gratifying. It was, however, in regard to some of the finer points of simple, successful existence that she lagged behind. 

Assisting her would not do him any harm, and it may even prove instructive.

He dragged the chair closer to the bed, and squeezed a pill-sized amount of crème onto his fingers. She watched his movements warily, but didn't shrink at his touch. He stroked the crème into her skin, which—rash aside—was cool and creamy as wooly milk. He pressed gently, into her cheek, down her neck. His hand stayed steady. Some... hormonal reflex deep inside him decidedly did not. 

"Do you use this stuff?" she asked, low and slow. 

There was that hungry, lecherous look which rose up in him again—though he could hardly doubt the reason for it now. He tempered it to a smirk. "Can't you tell? One must keep up one's appearance." 

Her dark eyes were sharp now. They pierced. "You have a nice appearance." 

He swallowed a laugh and continued his ministrations. What she _said_ was not humorous—Max knew he was handsome. What was _funny_ was how quickly, how easily, this hazy chaos in the shape of a woman could snap into fine-edged reality. How effortlessly she penetrated what he considered his hard, orderly mind with one look, with a few dull words. 

"Thank you, Miss Brook." Max dared to touch the edge of her lush, stained bottom lip. It was ever so slightly wet. The dim light of the room reflected there, and in her wide, black eyes. She was striking. "You might, too, if you tried." 

A hint of a smile stirred her full mouth. 

Another thing stirred within him. It was not simply hormonal, though he theorized there was an overlap. 

Max never considered himself a lonely person. One would have to want company and friendship to feel the pain of being denied those luxuries. And they were luxuries, in Halcyon. Laborers labored, preachers preached, managers managed, and all imagined that in the sparkling, sun-soaked mansions of Byzantium, the Board and its favored citizens lived lives of leisure. Free time filled with real joys and pains and lusts, emotions that only aetherwave provided to the masses in remote fictions. 

But Max did not desire leisure nor luxury. He wanted one thing his entire life. There had been distractions, though they only distracted for moments, in the cosmic view. Now, as he touched this woman who should not exist, in a situation he created with his own hotheaded defiance, some heretofore buried thoughts unearthed themselves. 

That he was completely untethered from the Order, from that which defined his life. That he had no idea what he was, beyond a vicar, beyond a scholar in pursuit of Scientist truths. That being cut off from what you are, what you have always been, was true loneliness. 

And worst of all: that he and Miss Brook must be two of the loneliest people in space. They fit nowhere, among no one. He was nothing more than a grotesque animal, like the canid, when it came to her. He heard an echo of himself in her hollow blankness and followed in her footsteps. 

He smoothed the last of the crème into her skin, and let his fingers drift along her throat. Her pulse was there, mutely drumming. She was alive, wasn't she? In defiance of her bewildered worry, whatever she was now, she lived. He felt her cool breath on his skin. She was in no more danger of fading away than himself. 

"There," he said, an attempt to bring some finality to his thoughts. Her black eyes blinked, and shut, when he took his hand away, like he'd shut down a mechanical with one switch.

Max picked up the book he'd held in the kitchen, and read it aloud to her. Something less familiar, to keep his mind on her request. He sat back in the chair, focused on the poetry in which he was not versed, concentrating on its admittedly clunky rhythm. 

_Glorious, the gilded age now dawns,_  
_Man doth rise like a god's monolith..._

"So, Miss Brook, are any of these ideas familiar to you?" he asked after a few spiritless stanzas. She didn't answer.

She couldn't. When he peered over the book, he spied her on her side, in his bed, sleeping. Not entranced, but purely, silently asleep. The tangle of dark hair swept over her cheek, one pale hand clutched onto the frayed edge of his bedcover. 

In another state of mind, he would have been more irritated. Disinclined to nurse a drunken, cryo-sick captain. Offended that his voice, his sermon, was so tiresome he stupefied even an insomniac. But he was not cruel, nor callous. He knew she couldn't sleep. And now she was, her sweet, slack face laid against his pillow. 

He wanted his own bed for sleeping, and he had no thoughts of trading with the captain for a night, stuck in that smoky bunk with all her confusion and wreckage around him. It wouldn't be unkind to move her. If she could sleep at all, she should do it in her own room. 

Max stood, discreetly, and reached for the anointing vial in which he stashed his whiskey. A common trick among the clergy. One quick quaff to wake him. It stung and numbed.

Before, he thought he didn't like her. Now it seemed... he had not liked what he saw of himself in her. A Lawless, purposeless shambles of urges and incitements. A black, blank space inside, where some part of him wandered through the dark, looking for an exit.

If he, who had been trained and devoted to becoming a living example of order, could not manage that task, how could he expect it of her? 

He leaned into the berth and wrapped his arms around her, to lift her from the bed. His nose dove into her hair—unavoidable, it was everywhere—and that tea-smoke scent lived there. It met the mock apple and sweat of her skin. Oh, there was, no doubt, some shrouded section of his mind which pictured how this scenario might evolve, if she were not asleep. And if he were fortunate, it would wait until a later, more solitary time to come back to him for exploration. 

For now, he pulled her to her feet and she blinked awake. She took two sleepy, crooked steps before she wobbled, and he caught her. He walked her down the hall, down the stairs to her quarters. Each clumsy footfall made a hushed, metallic ring. 

Max slid her door open and she sagged in the frame, a looser version of the way she'd appeared at his own room, drowsier—was she clear-headed, or half-asleep? He couldn't see—but her eyes glinted in the dimmed shiplight. "Thanks," she said, straightening to her full height. Her voice cracked.

"Perhaps one kindness might beget another?" He smiled. "If we could make our way to Mon—"

She interrupted him. With a kiss. 

Miss Brook pressed against him before he saw her move, faster and closer than cannon shock. That energy blast might have felt like her kiss—stunning and electric and fatal. He wouldn't know. He only knew this: her cold fingers curled around his jaw, and her lips, cool and soft, like he imagined. 

Whatever yawned and roused in him before, some internal tug or fancied likeness between them, now it woke and flashed with heat. Her kiss was shallow, but he wanted her depths. 

He thrust her into the bulkhead. The wall clanged when his hot hand smacked the metal. He was a man of wants and ambitions, for Law's sake. He would not demur when one of those wants was in his hands. One hand, at least—which searched and snaked beneath her clothes to feel as much of that pale, plump skin as he could find. 

The other steadied him while his body crashed into her own. While his lips descended from hers to her neck, and his tongue tasted the sweet apple-salt tang on her skin. While his teeth grazed along her throat, clasped tight onto an earlobe, and savored the feel of her in his mouth. 

Her chest rose and fell against him, breathing, pulsing.

Max sighed, ready to reach for her jacket and jerk it away, when her stillness stopped him.

She slumped against the hull wall. He arched backward, caressed both his hands around her neck, to read her gaze. And he couldn't. She was awake, he was certain, but—her hands hung limp. She leaned, listless, and did not move. There was a quaver in the low shiplight caught in her eyes. 

It was doubt or it was dread, maybe. It was the mark of a misstep. He took his hands back. She watched him for a moment, her stare dark, then retreated to her room without a word. 

The icy slide of the door on its rails matched the unease in his chest, cold and closed. 

A scientific mind studied the data and asked questions. She engaged him, unbidden. He returned her round, with fervor. She disengaged. Did his vigor spook her? Had he... misread her kiss for something more? Was it only polite praise, overly effusive for what he knew of Miss Brook— But what did he know of her? 

He stalked up the steps, to his empty berth, ever examining. 

There were meaner, smaller thoughts. Perhaps she wanted to kiss _someone_ —that intolerable toothpaste doctor, young Millstone, even, because he amused her—but Max had been the body nearest. She was all impulse. No logic. And he was victim to the same impetuous rashness when she touched him like that. That well-worn violent enthusiasm. That feverish urge. 

He did not understand her intentions, or his own, at times like this. He didn't understand _her._ His earlier ruminations and reflections fell apart like the Unreliable. 

The affinities he saw were only fictions. Delusions born from desire. He devised her a depth and a nature to suit his specifications, when hers had been numbed off, left on ice, in space. 

It did not do to imagine oneself in a frozen mirror, a mind far gone. There was no reason to be found. He knew who and what he was, despite it all. He was not like her. 

  
\---

  
The next day brought more menial tasks. Miss Brook towed Max along to the Groundbreaker, ignoring his declared disinterest, his glowering and grievance-making. She bid him walk with her to the foul sprat-fryer on the promenade—she'd cut a deal with the vendor for the raw leavings and offal, to feed her canid. Nominally, Max supported such entrepreneurship, since otherwise he might be tasked with helping her trap the vermin. 

But today, he detested everything she did. It was reasonable, he reasoned—everything she did was pointless and confusing and the product of a maladjusted mind. If he had ever been indulgent or made allowances, that was a mistake. One to be corrected, with haste.

As they waited for the pickup, he itched at his chin. He had a two-day growth of beard; grooming, like everything proper, had been too long neglected. 

She turned to him, with an almost smile, a shine in her eyes. "I think," she began slowly, her raw voice rasping, "that I remembered things. From home." This might have been her best attempt at excitement. "An ocean. Sand. Sharp... trees? There was sun and people in the water." 

The sprat vendor returned with her loathsome package and the captain turned her mind to that.

There may have been a time these memories, if they really were, this puzzle, would be of interest to Max. The problem now was that he did not particularly want to hear her speak. When she tried to resume, toting her box of meat as they made their way downship, he cut her off. 

"I don't think you are truly remembering anything, Miss Brook. Your consciousness is shot," he said, short and hard and mean. "You may very well be concocting these ideas. Spouting every fantasy that flies through your head. Making up whoever you were, or are, as you go." 

She stopped, and set herself back against the path rail, meat box under her arm. She said nothing, but she blinked—three times, quickly. Her forehead furrowed. 

There was no fight in her. Only confusion. He hated it. It spurred him on. 

"Between the wine and your sieve of a mind, I doubt you could even remember last night. Do you?" He stared at her. _He_ did not blink. It was a pointed look and a pointed question. He wanted to prove some point from it. It was reason, not foolish emotion, which made him act. 

Whatever shine or excitement flitted through her expressions fell flat. "Most of it," she said. Her voice was hollow, and cold. "I thought I did." She shuffled the box in her grip and plodded down the promenade path, away from him.

If he thought she could truly feel sadness, feel _anything,_ perhaps it would look and sound like this pale echo of sensibility. The observable evidence showed the opposite. 

"Fuck it," he said to no one. It should be forgotten. If she had managed it already, so would he. It was the first wise thing she had ever done in his presence. 

And, minutes later, once he'd trailed her through the shops, his presence did not deter her from a long, friendly visit with the Halcyon Holdings emissary. Max skulked in the shadowy entry, the soft-lit marble lobby, grateful he wore some cast-off worker clothes, and not his vicar's cassock. If the Board had an ear to her destinations, and the reasons, they would connect his abandoned post to her, and _him_ to what he should not be doing. They would send him back to the Labyrinth. Or worse. 

Miss Brook did not care. She could not care about that, or anything, it seemed, but that disgusting animal.

Later, in his room, writing was a failure. Study was impossible. And reading for pleasure was no pleasure at all. His face itched terribly, and when Max inspected himself in the small shaving mirror he kept, he found the truth: his chin was inflamed, and reddened. Law take him, he picked up that canid-spittle rash from when she—

Black fucking hole.   
  
He drank from his vial of whiskey. The drink did nothing to blunt his rising fury. Like him, it only burned. He pitched the vial across the room. It was no long shot from the Wednesday zone—just a sad four-foot chuck fueled by impotent rage. The thing hit the greasy, shuttered ship window with a resounding crack, and bounced onto his bed, unscratched. It was made of sturdier stuff than he. 

He formulated a resolution. He wanted nothing to do with her. He would ask her once, only _once,_ per day for transport to Monarch, and no more. Otherwise he would situate himself here, in this grubby bunk he tried in vain to make livable, and work to his own ends. He had done enough for her. 

A scrape, a hard tap against metal, sounded behind him. Of course it was her. 

For a moment, Max thought she might be tranced again, and wandering the ship halls as she'd done before—blind and reckless. But her keen eye caught his. 

"Yes?" he asked, as discouragingly as possible. 

It didn't work. She came closer, walked right up to him. She set her hand on his shoulder and one cold finger skimmed his neck. She leaned toward his ear and her stormy hair swept across his cheek. 

"I remember last night," she whispered, though near everything was a whisper in her throaty voice. "I didn't want to stop, but... I didn't know how to go on." 

He kept his hands to himself, straight down, in tight fists. He tried to stop himself from answering, to ignore her. And he failed. "You seemed afraid."

"I was. But not of you." He heard her swallow, and something trembled through him. "I wanted you to follow me." 

He sighed. "Miss Brook, how could I possibly know—" 

"There were too many thoughts. Somehow. But you... helped me remember." She leaned back and stared into his eyes. "Help me again." 

She let go, stepped back, and gestured lazily for him to come along. 

Every rational thought told him not to go. But he couldn't help wondering what, precisely, was buried in her mind, clouded as it was with so many muddled notions. Just like he couldn't help watching the curve of her hip as she turned and walked through the door. 

And his mind's eye saw that soft shoulder and arm, that dimpled thigh again, the way he'd conjured it over and over alone in his bed.

So she asked him for something else. A help he might, in some way, provide her. He was eager to try. 

She disarmed him, dismantled all his anger and his reason with a touch and a whisper. He should have been afraid of that. 

It was less a charity and more a distraction. But what wasn't? Until he found the man he searched for on Monarch, what else was there? He wanted a distraction. He wanted her. 

He followed the cold air which trailed behind her, the quiet steps to her quarters.

Outside her door, Max scratched at his chin. _Miss Brook,_ he thought again, _do you know what you’re doing?_ But the question was better aimed at him. 


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Captain is counseled, and comforted. 

Proving I am right would be admitting that I could be wrong.   
— Beaumarchais

The canid clawed at the door, whining. Max had taken its place. 

Now _he_ was let into the Captain's quarters to curl around her legs. To sniff and lick at her skin until she whined, too. To feed upon whatever scraps of herself she spared for him. 

Miss Brook sighed his name—at least, he believed he heard it, for the end and the beginning both faded in a choke and swallow, and all that was clear was the _ah_ and her cool breath. 

How far was the frost in her? If he kissed down the white curve of her throat, along the smooth slope between her ribs, his lips chilled. Oh, she had her warm spots, and he lingered long at each—but the core was cold. It was a line of old ice, from her stomach to her brain. 

That question mattered little in the moment. She told him it was helping. She told him it felt good to touch him—it felt real. 

As opposed to, Max surmised, the mass of monotonous moments which made up the rest of her waking life. To her, an afternoon in the galley pinching reluctant bites from a Dark Matter bar bore no more or less resonance than ten minutes swinging a scythe into the cracked carapace of a mantisaur. Both were poisonous and disappointing. Both amounted to nebulous nothings, and dissolved into the distance when the fog dimmed her mind once more. 

Food betrayed her. Unlike him, violence wearied her. Only this, his weight and heat heaving, or her ample thighs clenched around his hips, pinning him to the cramped, cold bunk—this stimulated her. She asked for it, again and again. 

Max could not help but oblige. 

Scientism, as a rule, did not engender passions such as these. Scientism was cold, like her, and orderly—quite her opposite. But he had always craved more understanding of his faith, far past his peers and even the elders in the church. He tested the extremities of orthodoxy—or so his tribunal decided, before they sent him to Tartarus. Reliving that shame, even in memory, surged ice through his blood, in a manner he imagined must resemble Miss Brook's altered physiology. 

Momentarily, of course. The desire did not freeze or die. It raged on. And so it morphed and molded around this new diversion. It had few other outlets, in recent weeks. His studies were stunted. His course was cut off—until the captain chose to cater to him, and take him to his desired destination. He did his part to convince her, with ardent explanations and fervid whispers mid-thrust. _Please,_ he would beg, _I need to, oh_ —and though his words may have stifled short, he was certain the meaning was evident. 

Even so, words were not the only means of rhetoric between two minds, or bodies. Sweat slipped along his hairline, eyes half-shut and arms shuddering. He tested his touches: two or three hooked fingers scratched into the tender inner thigh; a wet, open, biting kiss at the curve of her breast. He elicited interesting responses: "Oh, fuck _me_ that's it. Right there, yes. Harder. _Harder,_ damn it, don't you— Get on your back. _Yes,_ like that. Max. _Max. Fuck."_

He drew pleasure from her and saw its effect. She spoke clearly and quickly. She was awake. Her eyes opened. What did he see there, through his own clouded gaze? The black of them glittered, dappled a deep blood brown, variegated and veined as any polished stone. They were sharp and sly, stirred with the heat of knowing and wanting. He knew the depth of that demand. He stoked and fed it, in himself, and whenever he found it in her.

It never lasted long enough. Nothing could. The eyes drew dark again. The skin went cold, the body still. The change haunted him. When in contemplation of some doctrinal perplexity, some abstruse cosmological query, that image of her, blank and spiritless, tired and indifferent while he burned for her—she surfaced in his thoughts. Ghostly, overwhelming. The Equation in effigy. Locked, to him. For now. 

If he could unlock what was in _her,_ if he could find that design in her, the Architect reflected... His mind turned mystic when he thought this way. She had come, true as she said, from the star-strewn chasm of space. She swallowed its vacuity. Perhaps, also, she held some of its knowledge.

What the elders and the tribunal arbiters could not see—or did not _want_ to—was that Max was a scriptural literalist. A fundamentalist, he believed in its inerrancy. He took the word as it was. The word said the Universal Equation could be solved, and the solving would bring peace, would end striving. He wanted to know the arrangement of the universe, so that nothing else would need to be known. 

Was there something like that in this, the blissful, thoughtless void they shared? Minute sparks of understanding everything, and nothing, all at once? Body and mind moved in autonomic impulses, yet one was conscious of each nerve and encouraged each reward. There was an enlightenment in the disconnect. A self-sublimation, to be found in fucking.

The universe itself was there, _here,_ in microcosm. In the hard spiral of her ear beneath that storm of hair; in her eye, the multitudinous black of every conceivable color; in the closest, true scent of her skin, and its taste—cold ozone and dust and some sugary memory he could hardly recall. She was past and present at once, and he was not future, not anything. A consciousness blinking in and out of function, observing and recording data it wanted desperately to understand.

Her hair draped and dragged across his chest, and the limp waves caught in his own coarse patch of curls. Her cool, soft lips kissed his nipple, staggered open and slow over his ribcage. Even her eyelashes swept his skin, tickled his hipbone. She sank slower. _Miss Br—_

"May I call you Evangeline?"

Releasing him, she blinked, breathless. "Sure," she said, with a shrug. Then resumed her— _oh, Law_ —her attentions. 

It did seem an odd formality to request informality, right then with her exquisite mouth around him, while his legs trembled under her hands. He had been accused a time or two of pretentiousness. Perhaps she found him as puzzling as he did her—but no. He was absurdly simple. She was an enigma even to her own mind. Only the fabric of being itself was more mystifying than—

"Evangeline..." He whispered it as though it were a pillar of faith. As though what circled his fingers were smooth prayer beads and not long, dark tangles of hair. His head dropped back onto the bunk bolster. He gasped and groaned. 

  
\---

  
The bunk was too small for the both of them, for the things they wanted to do and, inevitably, did. It offered no room for replete rest together, or quiet conference. And that, almost more than those heated, athletic endeavors, Max found himself—despite himself—craving each time he tread the stair to her quarters. _Almost_ more.

He cleared the floor. Calmly, this time, with a purpose and a good end. He rolled the sleeves of a workshirt to his elbows and set to the other kind of labor his body was still good for. Free of his smothering cassock or any hard-plate protection, he could crouch and reach to channel through the chaos. Evangeline didn't help. She perched in her bunk with a cooling cup of tea, a full Cosmic pack, and a freshly-dumped plate for her ashes. 

She balanced on the edge of blankness, so Max sought to keep her engaged. He raised each thing he found above the fray and judged from a frown or a furrowed brow whether to keep or to trash, or toss into a bin of broken armor and weapons for the enterprising and thrifty Miss Holcomb to scavenge. 

Things it seemed she had no use for: sharp silver earrings, one dead compass, a dozen dull sentry blades. Things which piqued her interest, however remotely: chipped music boxes, a sack of chicken feathers, a tossball card whose player reminded Max of himself in younger days. 

Soon, all was sorted. He wiped the sweat from his brow with a bare forearm and surveyed the space. Their own space, for no one—omitting the odious animal—entered the Captain's quarters but themselves. There was allowance, now, for the meager mattress he'd poached from a Roseway ruin, with its pillows and bedding. He'd engaged the mechanical to clean them and was forced to admit, the results were fine. There was clearance to lay the makeshift bed upon the floor, set it with sheets, and top it with a woolly hide he pilfered from storage, during his earliest Unreliable days. 

There was room to take Evangeline by the hand, raise her from her roost, and draw her down to the place he made for them. Unfastening, unbuttoning, unstrapping along the way. 

"Quietly, now," he told her, though she was silent save for shallow sighs when his fingers crawled over her hips, curved and dipped inward, and parted her legs. He was unable to follow her eyes, to see them ignite, such as he was, eclipsed between those lush thighs which had been the focus of his fantasies. Her thighs, her plump arms, the height and breadth of her, and everything hidden to him—all the small secrets of her body which he plumbed and penetrated, one by one. He could not see much, but he heard her choked moans, that occasional pant of his name. Felt her fingers in his hair brush, weave, tug—gently, gently. 

Then the thighs shivered. Her feet drove into his back and stomped the bed around him. She was awake. 

Work fortifies the spirit. When she calmed, when he was contented with his efforts and sated by her own satisfaction, he lay beside her. She pulled her favored objects—the tea, the plate, the pack—into arm's reach. She smoked and smiled at the ceiling. 

Her smile inspired his own. "What are we contemplating today?"

The black eyes darted in his direction. "I think you're good at that." 

"Am I?" A strange shyness warmed his face. It was a childish emotion—not one he had experienced since he was a boy. A boy, one with a timorous sense of self and only gauzy, unsettling knowledge of the realities of life, might harbor a fierce desire for recognition and praise. He might also just as gravely fear it. 

Now it occurred to Max, despite his long-held, adult reliance upon reason, that such a dichotomy recurred. Regarding his theological ambitions. Regarding Evangeline. Regarding what waited for him, unaware, on Monarch.

He doused the furtive fear and desire in him with logic and questions. With the wants of his body, her body. Those were readily addressed. 

He traced the shallow dip of her clavicle, the supple skin over bone. "Do you have any memory with which to compare?" he asked, not uncharitably, but also not wholly disinterested in the answer. 

"I don't want to." Evangeline exhaled her cold smoke. It trailed and dissipated like breath in frost. Her dark eyes glinted. "I like you, Max." 

Then she rolled onto her side, her back to his studying eyes, and stretched to snuff her cigarette. She stayed that way, and left him to linger behind her. 

Max shifted atop the sheets and smoothed his wrinkled shirt—for he was only half-clothed. He noted she had not given a _yes_ or _no_ to his question of her memory. That note fell to the floor, somewhere in the black expanse of his mind. 

She liked him.

If _love,_ in his life, had been a shorthand for obsession, for clawing and snarling at fulfillment in the face of an abyss, then _like_... surely it was nothing more than usefulness, proximity, or passing fairness of quality. He liked Iceberg Whiskey, and when Mr. Millstone stayed off-ship. Evangeline liked Max, presumably for what he could do to her. He liked doing it, as there was mutual benefit. He'd grown accustomed to her. Fond, at times.

There was the sum of her scents, for example. He differentiated the individualities from the whole even now, as he moved closer and curved an arm around her cold frame. There was the sour, dark tea; the burned bite of old smoke; the sharp metal he imagined was her frozen blood; and her body, a patchwork of warm mock apple and ice, a body engaged in miraculous function when it absolutely should not. They were the parts which made up the whole of what registered in his mind as Evangeline. 

When she passed him in the ship, or he shuffled impatiently nearby during one of her interminable, circular conversations in some township alley, the scent cut through the sulfur, the fish, the desperation. And he recalled holding her, close like this. Her backside pillowed against his thighs, his palm on the curve of her stomach. He breathed through her hair, like a filtered mask. The effects were longer-lived than a commercial inhalant. They were ease, and drowsiness, and a heart rate reduction of at least 1.5%. 

"So," he murmured against the back of her head, "have you remembered anything further?"

A scratchy grunt was her first answer. "Yeah. Little pieces. It's sort of..." She wafted a pale hand through the air in front of her as though she were clearing smoke, an act she never actually performed. "Blurry. Then clear in flashes." 

He dislodged an unruly bit of hair from between his lips. "And in the flashes?"

"The beach. Endless ocean. Sun on everything, and it felt—" She drew her hands close to her throat, pulled in her legs to her core, away from him. "It was so warm." 

The depth in her voice shuddered with something empty and bare. A yearning, almost. Max massaged his hand into her hip, along her cold thigh. "Say the air was unbearably salty or sulfurous, and it might be any number of places here in Halcyon." 

"No," she sighed, and reached to root somewhere out of his vision. There was the unmistakable, full-bottle clink of alcohol. So he had not yet found everything she hid away. She pushed out of his grasp and sat up to uncap it. "Big, glassy houses, full of windows. Real ones you can see the ocean through. And people. Laughing and drinking." 

After a long indulgence from the bottle in her hand, her expression soured. "Something better than this." It was an Algae Lager, and warm at that. 

"Sounds positively Byzantine." Max enjoyed his low vantage point for a few more moments—her opulent, pale nakedness, all the rosy roundness of her limbs, that halo of wild, dark hair—before he joined her in sitting. "Perhaps you were of the upper echelon there, hm? A scion of society, bits beyond counting?"

He could picture it, nearly. He knew nothing of Earth but the vaguest historical notions they'd given in school. Here, though, he knew what the fashion and faces of wealth looked like, from periodicals he paged through in imprisoned boredom in the Labyrinth, from whatever unavoidable faff they chose to promote on the aether. She would be dressed in glittering garments, her height augmented by impractical heels, her breeding the result of innumerable factors for beauty and connection, like some poor teacup canid created only for brief amusement.

All that must have its fleeting pleasure, else none would waste time in its pursuit. Max preferred this vision of her: unclothed and undone, no one of importance, yet no one to be threatened. 

A half-smile played at her full lips. "I like your eyes," she said, apropos of nothing, no answer to his pondering. She spoke into the bottle. Her dark voice rang against the glass and echoed. "They're... complicated." 

He scoffed and took the lager. It was pungent and sweet. Her mouth cooled the rim. 

"The card I found, from the Hope, we presume? It doesn't stitch together any memories for you? Assuming it was factual." 

Evangeline tilted her head blankly. Two of her fingers inched along his forearm, and teased under the thick roll of his sleeve. "I don't know."

That identification placard, the one which named her Evangeline. It listed her bits in full along with her onboard class, and both were lowly. Perhaps the entire story was not written out under its laminate. One could imagine serial-worthy dramatics—lives stolen or switched for safety, mercenaries and spies posing as new people. Or one could employ the logic at hand, and calculate and question based on only the data presented. 

"Of course, if you were of the elite, if life was so beautiful, why would you ever leave it? There would be a reason," he reasoned. 

Her fingers fell away. She stared out the star-filled window. "I must have been lonely." The cold was in her voice again, the depth and black of it. "I remember that. Or it—" Her blank face tightened. "It feels familiar."

It was not a familiar feeling for Max. Neither was compassionate empathy, or whatever tightly-strung vibration which thrummed through him now. 

Emotions are metaphors. They rather poetically describe certain natural functions of body and mind, chemical reactions and hormonal responses to stimuli. There was a school of clerical thought which sought to quash and eradicate emotion at the root, through dogma or drugs, in pursuit of clearer thinking and better, harder work. 

Max, though, was not alone in a more philosophical approach to the matter. Emotions were instinctual and physiologically sound. They could not be plucked off or medically evacuated. They could, however, be counseled away. Exercise a person's logic and watch the emotion recede. Encourage rational thought and faith in reason. 

The further Max receded from his vicar's life, the more critically he seemed to need reminding of those ideas. Yet he had more chances to employ them than ever before. 

"Whatever you feel has little to do with the truth, and the situation you found yourself in which led you to the colonists' ship." He lunged to set the ever-warmer lager upon her desk, then sank back into the bed. "What you feel is not proof of anything but your own faulty brain processing its input. Spotty functionality, like an unserviced mechanical." 

He wanted to help her. He gave her the help he hoped would succeed, whatever form it took—harsh truths, or physical distractions. Both should be beneficial. One he enjoyed more than the other. 

"I suppose we couldn't provide proof of any theory or confirmation of facts unless we ventured to Earth together," he mused. Now, there was a fantasy. He had no desire to be confined to a cryo-chamber for decades, having seen the damage done. But there was an excitement to the idea—not the thin veneer of risk and exploration broadcast over aether, but truly experiencing a place which only existed for him as story. 

Of course, Evangeline was engaged in just such adventure, and it had done her hardly any good at all. 

Perhaps that was why she had such a very different reaction to the notion of traveling back to Earth. Her eyes flashed sharp in his direction, then deadened black. She grasped for a new Cosmic, and snapped at a lighter three times, impatiently, before it flamed. "Don't think that's possible," she said around the cigarette. Her pale, purplish lips were dry, and pouting. 

If reminders of that long ago trans-space skip, of her frozen confinement thereafter, unconscious though she may have been—if that frightened her into coldness, Max understood. Truths were best delivered to a willing audience, open and pliable. He had multiple methods. 

"Oh, people do go back and forth." His hands found the cool sides of her thighs and stroked, slowly, up. "UDL shipments. Directorate forces." He wedged his knee between hers and hauled himself closer, his fingers dug keenly into her plush, round hips. "Less lately, now that Halcyon sustains itself. But it continues." 

He bore his weight into her, tenderly, and urged her flat beneath him. With one hand, he collected the Cosmic from her mouth and discarded it in the ash-scattered plate. With the other, he splayed her legs wide around his own. 

She sighed smoke. He sucked at her dry lip and bit into its fullness. Her fingers kneaded hard into his back. It was vital, that touch, the cold shock of it against his rising heat. A thermal transfer, an electric charge. 

"You see, commerce is much like life itself," he whispered, while she quivered and clutched him closer. "Unstoppable." 


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which emotions get the better of us all.

I see the outcome. My wisdom is as scorned as chaos. What is my nothingness to the stupor that awaits you?  
—Rimbaud

  
One leniency of clutter Max allowed—encouraged, even—in the Captain's quarters, post-purge, was food. If he shoved the stained and soiled rug where the canid slept on occasion, along with its putrid, sprat-scrap bowl, into the farthest corner from the bed, even he could ignore them both and eat. Once one fierce need of his body was gratified–and it was duly done, with frequency and fervor that made him feel quite young again, if sore with undeniable age–the other sprang up in its place. He was ravenously hungry, every time. 

A few preferred pickings kept on hand were enough to calm the wild growling of his stomach—he was not above dry Purpleberry Crunch from the box or sprinkled on bred. It only _had_ to be sufficient for him, in any case. After the first few tries at sharing seemed to sicken her, Evangeline rebuffed his continual nudges with a cold stare, a bare shake of her head. The woman could hardly digest anything Halcyon had to offer. Though her residence in the colony was undoubtedly permanent, her insides had not come equipped for the change. 

Max recalled the settlers' history reported some sickness, starvations. Earth-sent rations were in short supply and terraforming transfigured the hard, puny native flora into human-ready fruit. Ready for some fortunate humans, as he understood it, which was vaguely. Lamarckian inheritance and nutritive synthesis were studies best left to the laboratory sprats in corporate research. His scientific calling was on a much higher plane of thought.

But however high, he saw what was in front of him. Evangeline's deep-set eyes grew more shadowed with the passing weeks. Her face lost some of its fullness. Yet she held her own in a firefight, showed she was beyond capable when a row came to blows, and her body—he could affirm, with pleasure, there was no change in its inviting abundance. 

She was designed for survival. She was not dead, and certainly not weak. 

Max, in her stead, had only one obstacle when it came to eating: quantity. The stash of foodstuffs he stored dwindled. It happened too often he was not prepared, focused as he was on other matters. Whenever he managed to extract himself from around her, or atop her, he was in no fit state to be seen. The very idea he might putter up to the galley for a meal, half-naked and hips aching, as though they had the whole ship to themselves... Well, its appeal was only proof of how lax and lazy he'd become. How undisciplined in his thoughts. 

Hunger, however, was a force difficult to deny. So he did find himself removing, reluctantly, from her cool, soft, naked body, walking the suddenly interminable path up the clanging stair, and treading the long, focused hallway to the galley. The canid snapped and snarled at him from its spot in the mechanical's closet. Everyone else—and it was truly everyone, even the mercenary dilettante Evangeline invited from the Groundbreaker medbay—sat around the long table and watched him approach.

His cassock—wrinkled by grasping hands, displaying one or two strange stains—needed a clean and a press, a job he would prefer to do himself. Once he had the time. So he wore a garment he'd set aside when he cleaned: a gray workshirt and suspendered brown pants, fit for any laborer and also himself in a pinch, kept neatly folded upon a clear corner of Evangeline's desk. Why he'd kept this combination of clothing was a complicated question. He was not prepared to answer it with any conscious consideration. 

The crew's watchful eyes discomfited him. Max knew how it looked. It looked like what it was. He was underdressed and unprofessional. Likely his hair was well out of order, or her singular scent had taken him as a new carrier. 

By Law, he'd lived in closer quarters, far _worse_ ones, with no hint of privacy or personal space. He'd fought and fucked in plain earshot, if not outright view, of absolute strangers—but that was a part of his life he had no desire to recall, or relive. There was no shame in his counsel with Evangeline. Shame was for the spineless. The Universal Plan favored the bold. He stepped straight-backed up to the fridge. 

"The Captain is hungry," he announced, to no one's query. The fridge door shuddered open and he reached blindly for anything which might be half-full. 

"Boss ain't ever hungry." That was Mr. Millstone's dull retort. The young and monumentally foolish Felix stared at the crumpled periodical in his lap with a sour, nauseated frown. The paper featured mostly pictures, which was appropriate for him. 

Max piled two cold mock apple shakes into the crook of his elbow. "I am encouraging her to eat more." 

"Well, that's—" Miss Holcomb, across the table, and gave him an encouraging smile, strained though it was. "That's real nice, Vicar. Captain don't seem too keen on caring for herself. So." She poked at the steaming bowl of noodles before her with a bent fork. "Good on you for doing it." 

Caring for her? In a sense, he supposed. He had other plans, other aims. He needed the Captain in order to pursue them. There were undisclosed factors which informed their association. Undeniably. Care, as the soft-hearted mechanic might see it, was not part of the formula. It was simply practical to keep her well and happy. It benefited him, in several ways.

There was a snort from the end of the table—too loud to be genuine, meant to be heard. Dr. Fenhill, of course, her chair leaned back at a reckless angle, soiled boots set selfishly on the communal table. "So this is what spiritual counseling looks like these days? No wonder I stopped going to church. Too, uh... intimate for me." 

The fridge fell shut. Max straightened the stash in his arms and shot her a baleful look. Oh, it hardly stung to hear her feeble invective, and it was not the first time he'd been the subject of such faultfinding. But neither could it be tolerated. A crew of children, and fools. They couldn't throw out their taunts without hearing an answer.

"I don't think a failed doctor playing pirate has scaled any lofty height from which to judge." He sank his sore hip against the table. "Let's speak plainly, Fenhill. You think I've taken advantage of the Captain? That I ought to stick to prayer and bluster? Tell me how I should act to better suit you." 

Miss Holcomb's eyes grew as wide as her noodle bowl, but the doctor's narrowed. She swung her boots back to the floor and made a point of folding her hands with restrained precision. "Just joking, Vicky," she said, the way one might, in vain, calm the canid when it inevitably went rabid. "I really don't care about anything you do." 

"Ah," he answered. His relief was genuine. "Good." 

And he tightened his arms around the new hoard of food, carting it down the narrow hall. 

Once before, he'd had parishioners prattle over his affairs. The Hammersmith workers of Palisade, and they were a pious lot. It was another colonial hole like Edgewater, like the town where Max was born. They bore some imagined notion of propriety for their clergy which smacked sorely against the natural order of things. Namely, that people fucked. Always had, and always would. Biological impulses may be controlled, for a time, but not eradicated. 

All Max understood about the whispering was that, ultimately, it implicated Maud more than himself. Petty, the dramas which permeate a provincial town. Though liaisons were allowed, the ordained made poor, and typically unwilling, prospects for marriage contracts. So one might meet a party uninterested in those proceedings. A vicar might meet such a person at church. 

Others met eventual contracteds there, of course—sermons and services were a welcome break from work and all its diminishment. They gave a worker guidance, and released them from the strain of decision-making, of conscious choice. What better time to submit oneself to the ebb and flow of the Plan, and find a partner in a pewmate? 

Maud was older than he'd been then, and the town's barkeep. It was not his initial idea to turn his guidance physical. First it was only her wayward wandering between alcoves, her furtive interest in asking after some theological axiom long understood even by children. Then the next visit, her attentions coming closer, her palm brushing the nap of his vestment sleeve. And the third, giving into the inevitable: she led him to a dark, humid corner, he held her tight against the paint-cracked chapel wall. Sweat-soaked and lust-blind, he quieted her moans with a hand, and a hard kiss. 

And then, the hearsay and calumny. It would have continued otherwise, and why not? Only the moronic mass of them found it faulty, and though it was pleasing in the moment, it was nothing he would put before his mission, his work. Soon enough, Maud left the bar and the town in her dust. 

But that was three posts ago. Before Tartarus. Another life. 

By the time he entered her quarters again, Evangeline was gone. Only the canid was there, tiptoeing its pointed claws onto their makeshift bed. Max dropped the food into the cold, empty berth, and swatted, keeping his distance from the teeth. The beast slobbered and grumbled, but retreated, and trotted sharply to its filthy rug. 

Max pulled up the bed and rolled it into a corner. He slumped his sore backside into the berth, among crinkled Cysty-Bit bags and Purpleberry Lunches, and stared down the animal. They wanted nothing to do with each other. They both looked for what was no longer there. 

He reached for the p-free nuts. Without her, the room was stifling warm, and loud. The canid's snuffling, Max's own chewing, even the sublevel hum of spaceflight echoed and annoyed. His hunger faded, unsatisfied, unnecessary. He collected the food into a neat arrangement on her desk, and gathered up his soiled cassock from the floor. It was long past time to wash the thing. 

  
\---

  
"When I'm with you," she told him, lying in his arms, her head crooked in his shoulder, black eyes trained toward some empty spot on the ceiling, "it's hard to remember being so lonely. I feel like a person again." 

It was another night, or afternoon, on the floor-bed of her quarters. The Unreliable's warped light cycles made their own erratic calculations. One lost track of time aboard, without variance of avocation, without deadline or demand. Without a careful watch of the calendar, where one might lose whole days adrift, in orbit of some remote relay, in the trafficless black. 

Max combed his fingers through the tangled length of her hair, stretched the waves out straight, and snagged on a knot. He breathed in against her temple: smoke and salt, the cool throb of her blood. "Do you? It can be... difficult to tell, at times." 

Evangeline laughed, low and humorless, under her breath. The sound shook and scratched. "I'm sure," she said. He expected her to apologize: for inconvenience, for incongruity. She didn't. She only rolled her back, shoulder blades unexpectedly sharp, over his ribcage and sighed. "What's the point of anything else? I'm not supposed to be here." 

He knew better. The Plan corrected for all miscalculations eventually. The one which led her here had been a long time in the computation. Her presence here, now, in Halcyon, was fated. Though he knew not why, or to what purpose. 

"You've been tasked with work, and plenty of it. They who are not satisfied with their work are satisfied with nothing." The phrase was so familiar in his mouth that sometimes the words no longer made literal sense—just consonance and rhythm. He stretched his neck as much as her rest upon him would allow. "I have my work, and I seek the satisfaction I know its completion will bring me." With one or two corrections of his own to make, in the meanwhile. 

"Your work?"

"Unraveling the mystery of the Grand Plan. You know this," he said, and tightened his cradling grip on her arm. Admittedly, his attentions had been diverted in recent weeks. Between Evangeline's series of two-bit jobs—which the entire crew clamored for, being woefully bereft of any bits worth the mentioning—and her need for his more personal... _assistance,_ less time and energy went to study. And yet what was there to study now? The books in his berth he'd read a thousand times. 

All but one. And there was the error in his own misshapen path which needed straightening. Soon. Soon enough. 

She drew a soft line down the open row of buttonholes in his shirt. The chill in her fingertip seemed to slice into his skin, and he shivered with a strange pleasure. "What if there isn't one?" she mumbled, monotone.

"Isn't what?"

"A Grand Plan."

He shook his head and sighed. Sometimes she was like a child with her questions. It was shocking to imagine the depth of damage in her—what it would take to erase such basic knowledge and understanding of humanity's unflagging faith. It was so deeply ingrained in every person. Even the rejectors—dissidents, marauders, the blasted Philosophists—they only existed in opposition to the truth. Without it, what were they? 

"There is one. And that's a heretical idea, Captain." The indulgent softness in his voice surprised him. 

Her fingers fell flat on his chest. "It really matters? That it's true?"

From whatever wounded, icy crack in her these thoughts had sprung, he hoped to heal it quickly. He took her chin in his hand and turned her face to his own. "Of course it does. We seek verity. Absolute truth. We cannot judge certainty without a constant. Otherwise we might believe fictions." 

Evangeline gave no sign she acknowledged or acquiesced. Her black eyes blinked slowly. And instead of saying anything, she craned her neck toward him, and left one cold, closed kiss on his lips. 

He might have preferred her spoken understanding, but took it as a positive, regardless.

"You shouldn't fret so over the point of things." Max loosed his arm from beneath her neck and worried at a tender recoil bruise. "You have a purpose, like everyone. The Plan will guide you." 

She drifted away. Her hair bloomed black across the pillow beneath her. Her breath came slower now. Sleepy, finally, or else— "Even the dead?" she asked, slurred and stagnant. 

He followed her pale, battle-marked hands as they settled into the bed. Her raw red knuckles, the dry skin at her nails. "Their purpose has been served. In life." 

She laughed again, half a laugh this time, more choked than the last. "Not dead. I must be..." Her eyes shut. One loose line of worry in her brow betrayed her thinking, summoning the words she wanted from the dark depths of her mind. 

"Immortal?" he guessed.

The eyes opened. She hummed a vacant confirmation. 

A jagged, nagging twist turned in his chest. It was happening again. She was at a remove. Soon, she would be blank. It grew worse each time, to see the way it changed her. She asked him, once, to stay with her through it–nothing happened, and there was no indication she even knew of his presence, in that lifeless state. But he stayed then, and continued to. He let her rest, if it truly was rest. 

He hitched on one elbow, his free hand tugging up the bedclothes to cover her. 

"You aren't immortal. It goes against all known science. But I suppose the very fact of you being here does so. Which means you..." That indulgence crept back into his voice. It worried him less now, that he knew she could not hear a word he said. She couldn't see him gaze at her with something he might describe as tenderness, if he saw it in anyone else. He brushed a limp length of hair from her frozen face, her dull, dazed eyes. 

"You're proof of something," he said. "Law knows what." 

  
\---

  
Miss Holcomb was an innocent, just as she appeared. Max could extrapolate from her anxious enthusiasm, from the cluelessness which matched her eagerness, that she never once considered stepping foot into an establishment like the Lost Hope. Before her rather desperate search for help, that is. 

She was, in her innocent, young way, flummoxed by infatuation. She sought the Captain's input, and though she had not asked Max to attend or advise, neither had she fussed when Evangeline pulled him along. Naturally. He'd been her vicar, after all: a trusted ear, older and wiser in matters of science and spirit. He'd been third-party witness to countless marriage contracts, and adeptly dispensed official church doctrine regarding couplings to the undaunted few who asked it of him. 

It was a tricky thing. There was little reason to be found at the back of most personal involvements. It was a test of one's mental rigor to separate fact from emotional fiction. A rigor he found weak in himself, as of late. For all he could spout the appropriate words, to give moral comfort through unchanging logic, Max's mind wandered. And where it wandered, it could easily be lost. 

The bar was a sprat-trap for sweaty spacers and stevedores, and smelled like it. The sawdust-strewn floor soaked up organic remnants best left unidentified. Tables sat sticky and stale with spills, and the din of drunken discord, of confrontation and camaraderie alike, was an endless, robotic loop of low bedlam. A player piano strung with barbed wire.

Evangeline ushered Miss Holcomb in, and tossed her own bitcard to the bartender before anyone could protest–not that Max would have said a word. Soon they each fisted short cups of straight Spectrum Red. The young mechanic's threatened to overspill with her trembling before she knocked it back in full. The Captain insisted. 

Max observed and drank slow from his own. The shudder and retch from Miss Holcomb he expected, after that display. Evangeline only poured more, unfazed and unaffected. Her fortification for spirits was a sight to behold. 

If he excelled at confessional listening, then Evangeline was a master. She never interrupted and frankly did not appear to process a single word. The now-less-innocent Holcomb talked her own way through her troubles. It was for the best. He could hardly imagine what advice Evangeline might conjure, and his imagination, when it came to her, was superb. 

Between steadying the mechanic, and offering rote guidance in the Scientician manner, Max watched Evangeline. How her white throat trembled as she sank more Spectrum, eyes wide and bright. How gingerly she shrugged off a worn leather jacket, down to something black and insubstantial he hoped to see again in private, her pale arms painted with purple bruises. How she laughed along with Miss Holcomb's wobbly confusion, and offered him a slow-blink smile. 

She stood taller than Max in her boots, and she was built for it. That first marauder to knock her down had been the last. Yet he was often struck, when he loomed over her in bed, or took her hand in his, by that wispy ethereality of hers. A ghostly lightness, when her short, soft fingers chilled his skin, or he held that thin, white neck between his hands. 

Rummaging once through a pile of their hotly-shed garments, she put on a shirt of his. And while he imagined it would fit her enticingly tight, instead it hid her shape, slouchy and free. Perhaps he'd grown larger than that worn-out image of himself he held in mind: the lithe thirty-second-back, the young seminarian in loose robes. He'd grown sturdier, and grayer. Older. 

The timescale shifted. It intrigued him, scientifically.

Miss Holcomb faded and reddened, back and forth, frantic as a tossball blocker on the pitch. Evangeline nodded, and looked to him for comment, which he performed dutifully, whether what he said was relevant or not. She _was_ listening, to the young woman, to him. Max hardly heard a word. 

How much time spanned between their existences in the universe? Between Evangeline's last waking moments on Earth, in the real lost Hope, and his own first breath in Halcyon? She was decades older than him. A lifetime or more. But here she was, flushed pink, wearing the satisfied bliss and numb smile only drink could provide, her wild, long hair electrified. Alive, and beautiful. And it weighed upon him. He felt the heaviness of life and time passing, time which she spiraled in and out of, unwilling—one foot in its flowing river, one on the steady shore.

The mechanic stuttered and buckled, sweating. Evangeline, in a rare moment of common sense, fetched a jug of Plain 'n Pure from the bar. It was the Spectrum, of course. Max might have warned or protested more strongly, but some lessons were best learned by experience. Miss Holcomb could make it back to the Unreliable, she insisted, "afore I lose my guts all over Junlei's boat. Oh, Law, what if she sees me like this?" 

Max watched Evangeline walk the young woman out of the bar, her discarded jacket in his lap. He kept his eye on the open doorway, ignoring the stream of Sublight scum and Mardet patrols, for her return. There: she pushed in, between two spacers in suspenders, and there: her black eyes fell upon him, right where she'd left him. And from the way the din disappeared, and time, in some uncanny mirror of her sickness, grew slow and sticky when she cut through the crowd and started straight for him, he knew. 

This was nothing like Zelene, or Maud, or any other. This was something quite different.

She screeched a chair close and whacked her knee against his with a dull crack. It was the bad knee he preferred to ignore. The trifling pain fetched his mind from meandering, down dangerous paths... She refilled their cups and emptied the tall bottle. "Now," she said, and she leaned into him, the rim of the cup just grazing the curve in her lower lip, "what about you?"

Max was typically unable to follow her line of thoughts, curved and cracked as it often was. "Me?" He did not know what she meant except in relation to Miss Holcomb's crush, and surely not even she would just _inquire_ whether he—

"You always ask me. What I remember." She sipped, now, and smiled. "It was so long ago. But you..." 

So. She wanted to give what she got. She was like that in her quarters, too. 

"Unlike yours, Captain, my faculties are excellent. They don't need testing." Her bare forearm brushed his. He'd thrown on some thin waistcoat from their now-shared wardrobe, an old shirt with long sleeves he rolled up in the heat of the crowded bar. Most places, wearing his vestments earned him two types of discomfort, from two types of people: disgusted disdain from hardly-disguised dissidents—or young half-wits like Millstone, and a fawning kind of fear from the devout. It was preferable, since joining the Unreliable complement, to disappear. To not be judged at the outset. 

"Just tell me things. While we sit." Her hand meandered downward between them, and her palm was cool even through his trousers, just above the knee she knocked. There was a soft squeeze, seductive or soothing he couldn't be sure—it was both, and both were welcome. 

"And don't call me Captain." 

Below the ceiling's string of bright bulbs, her dark eyes flashed fiercely. He stared and stared. 

"What do you want to hear, Evangeline?" 

Something in her eased when he said her name. Her round shoulders softened, her eyelids fluttered. She downed the last of her vodka. "Same as me? What you used to be like." 

"Surely I've shared more than enough about my misspent, uncomfortable youth with you." An edited version, though it was. 

Her only answer was a slow stroke of his thigh–up, and in, twice over the long muscle there which retained its tossball thickness. Oh, it was _nice,_ certainly it stirred him. His legs spread on instinct, and he sank warm into the chair. But it wasn't the fever he felt on the floor of her room, when her own thighs trapped him. It was more like the squeeze from her hand. He found some of that same sleepy ease in it. 

The rest of the Lost Hope seemed very empty and far away. 

The ease opened him to her question, but he didn't want to answer. No more about his sorry youth, when _sorry_ was a word he grew to loathe. He had to say it so much. Young Maximillian made no pretense of hiding his smarts or his striving. He wanted more than what he had in that little town, but laborers were meek and satisfied with the place and people they were born to. So he was sorry, in a way that made him savage instead of submissive, and then he was sorry for that, until—

"I didn't only join the church because of my parents, as I told you." His gaze followed her hand on his thigh. It moved slowly, the fingers curling. 

All that sorry agitation, his fundamental difference from his own family begged for answers, yes, which he thought immersion in Scientism would provide. But there was more. "I hoped to find others like myself. Or, more like me than they were." Men and women of intellect, who were not ashamed of their pursuit of truth. 

"But I didn't," he told her. 

He was disappointed. The seminary, the church hierarchy, they were as rigid and political as any corporation, as any colonial town. Their pursuits were petty, parochial. One ought not to step outside their bounds of behavior or belief, or risk exile. Max, it seemed, was not like anyone at all. 

Evangeline's hand stilled. She lay her head on his shoulder. He closed his eyes to the crowd, his mind to the noise. 

He'd lied, before. Max hardly told her anything about who he was, or had been. An outcast miscreant, an unorthodox theologian, an incarcerated offender. And whatever he was now, if he was even still a vicar or no. Truly, what was he, when he took off the cassock and left his flock? He couldn't ask her. She didn't know him, much as he did not know her. 

His own childhood vicar, the seminary school–they told him life was fated. All this was meant to be, predetermined. Max made changes, adjustments, mistakes. These were also meant to be. 

He was never inclined to contemplate himself so deeply as this, not even in prison, when an inner life was vital, if one wanted to survive. But he knew without looking—like his well-organized berth, everything in its place—what was in his mind. Even what he kept far from easy reach. It sat in the black, existent, silent. What he could never see was what lay hidden in Evangeline's. All the questions he could muster would not make it clear. Yet he would continue to ask them. 

Max lifted her head from its rest, assuming her half-asleep or wholly-bored by his reluctance to speak. But her eyes were wide and open. Hazy, and blind. He leaned her backward into her own chair, and she slumped in a stupefied heap. If not for the shallow breath he could see rising in her chest, he might have feared she was dead. 

There was a violent riling in him, well beyond frustration. It was furious and hateful, and it targeted her and whatever made her this way. This part-time person. At once everything which woke his sense of wonder, and an unfeeling, cold void. It would swallow all his sense if he allowed. 

So he chose not to let it. Some drunkenness deadened, him, too, though not enough. It required gritted determination not to give into his nature. Not to stand and hurl his chair across the bar, to smash into those rows of watered-down liquor bottles and feel the glass shatter and fly into the air. Envisioning the act, alone, gave him some small satisfaction. 

Instead, he gripped seat beneath him with a white-knuckled hold. He employed the tactic he perfected as that slender seminarian he still saw in his mind's eye: he suppressed. He diverted. He focused that rage into rumination. 

Her head lolled onto her own shoulder, now. Any patron of the place sober enough to take notice might simply imagine she was deeply drunk. Pickled and glassy-eyed, lost in somber regret. There may have been others who fit that description. Evangeline, though, was a victim of some malfeasance not self-inflicted. Not wanted.

It was the other part of his nature to explain the inexplicable. Or, at least, to try. The years had proven it over and over—despite his parents' denials and demands, despite the depressing fact that all Max ever achieved from his attempts were errors, and exasperation. None of it mattered. He could not change.

So he grasped her limp hand in both his own and thought. Why was she the way she was? 

In the loosest moments of his meditations, his wondering wandered toward the esoteric. Perhaps Evangeline had seen something he never could. A spiritual reckoning. An enlightened understanding which she gained from her dead time, so to speak, on the ship. On ice. She touched death and was reborn. What drifted there, in black space, on the edge of life?

But this line of thinking, if it could truly be called that, was folly. Untestable and unscientific. What he had was empirical evidence and history. If years as an ice cube brought one to a heightened awareness, a new knowledge of the workings of the Architect, then— Were all the first colonists so calm and dreadful in their tranquility? Were the laborers who built Byzantium, and the Board overseers who drove their work? Were his grandparents?

No. Something happened to Evangeline. Something made her this way. Ice and time froze away her senses. The shock of waking so abruptly, after so long. She had been changed, on a cellular level. 

Max longed to look inside her. If he could affix a microscopic lens to his eye... He might see those universal particles within her drifting, lazy and tired, through her plasma. Her nerves firing cold, dull sparks, where there should have been lightning.

He would not do that today. He could muse only on the metaphysical. The physical would be limited to lifting her to loose feet, draping her dead arm around his shoulder, and dragging her body back to her ship, to her berth, to her canid and her empty bunk. 

The bolster flattened under the dead weight of her head. He left her there, the limp hand he'd held hanging off the edge of the bed, the beast sniffing it for food. 

Max's own room was warmly-lit and clean. All his belongings and books were there in order. All his notes, his diaries, scrawled with the tight shorthand he'd developed in childhood, to keep his writings private. 

His most recent work—some attempts at a new dialectic on why Architectural motive is unnecessary to determine—was in that shorthand, on loose papers tossed across his desk. They dated from his first week on the Unreliable. Weeks and weeks ago. He could read them, of course. But he could not pick up the scattered threads of his thinking. The inquiry was obscured from his memory. 

It was curtained by skip-travel and township jobs, by talks with Evangeline and her touch, her cold touch, which compelled him. Consumed him.

His only subject of study now, it seemed, was her. 


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Vicar gets what he wants.

How little do the lips and heart agree!  
How joyfully do people break their word!  
We both are strangers in a foreign land.  
— Racine

Two things changed after the night at the Lost Hope. Not immediately, not at the nanosecond the ship's next daylight cycle rumbled into a torpid wakefulness. Rather it was in a nothing time of trivial travel back to Emerald Vale, for no real reason—not one Max had been given, in any case. 

In those days, Evangeline developed what seemed to be a new, useless habit. She left ship, one mate and gun for backup, and made her slumbering way toward the ruins. She picked and plundered junk from abandoned prefabs: stuffed grayed, threadbare underwear and rusted Corporation Service Awards, among other paltry scraps of former habitation, signs of life, into her bulging bag. She made no effort to visit the townships or speak to colonists, and she never strayed for more than two hours at a time. 

So Max heard, or observed from afar. He was not asked to attend these outings. Max, if he cared to examine the patterns left by their lives, might have noticed the pensive circularity of both their steps from the Lost Hope onward. It dotted and marked his path, and hers, like trails of blood from wounded, stumbling rapts. 

Two things changed. First, Max no longer slept well. 

It was the light and heat cycles, perhaps, which calibrated themselves clumsily against planet-bound weather and time. Or it was a restless agitation inside him, which prodded his nerves and kept his eyes from closing when they should. 

He'd begun to stay in Evangeline's room at night—a habit formed from the restful repose he always sought after their time together. Sweat-chilled, stamina-spent, he would burrow into the strangely snug floor bed, slope Evangeline's soft arm across his stomach, and sleep, without meaning to stay for long. 

Max didn't know when she slept, or if she slept at all—only that she was sometimes there, and sometimes not. He woke once, the bed empty yet feverish hot from his wide, splayed sleeping, and realized the emptiness was what stirred him. Reaching into the dark for pants and a shrugged-on shirt, he ventured barefoot into the dim, hushed stairway and heard ADA, a faint, far-off monotone. 

He found Evangeline there, in the black navigation room, legs curled into the captain's chair. The monitor lights flashed bright against her face: one cheek white-blue from the colony map, the other deep ADA red. The canid had found her first. It nuzzled at her toes. 

Max watched, silent, from the ship's entry. She tapped her fingers against the map screen and spun the colony, pinched and focused on Terra 2, on Eridanos, on Monarch. Her own voice, flat as ADA's, with a smoky pitch, broke the quiet. "Where are all the oceans?" 

"There are approximately 38 million cubic miles of terraformed and natural ocean in the Halcyon colony, Captain. Please be more specific."

A cold sigh. "Show me Edgewater. The beach there."

And at this, Max stepped away, not eager to revisit that place even at a distance. 

Her nightly disappearances continued, and continued to wake him. He made sure, each time, she was in the same place, though the certainty did nothing to ease him back to drowsing in her room, alone. With her in it, the bed was cool and comfortable. Without her, he felt each rivet and seam in the ship's hull beneath him through the meager mattress. 

But when he stomped sluggishly up the stair and back to his own room, to a place which was a quiet solace at one time, he couldn't sleep there, either. The berth he found so clean and simple before, befitting a solitary scholar who slept only when he didn't study—now it seemed cramped and punishing as a prison bunk. 

The second thing—which followed from that night, like a scar from a cut—was that her blank spells no longer surprised him. Max would not allow it. He watched, and waited, for the inevitable numb silence. The dark slump of her head upon that soft white neck, the flat eye which saw nothing. No, not nothing—s _omething,_ something he could never see, no matter how he peered and pored into the black. 

But that was beside the point. What Max _would_ see were the signs: a little slur in speech, a pause one note too long between words. Then he was prepared. If he saw it coming, no irrational excitability would erupt from him, from his twitching, tired mind or his fevered chest. Whatever sore, weak part of him which bred those awful anxieties. Wherever within him reason had gone slack. 

It was no longer a distraction. It was an obsession. He knew. He knew what he was and what he had always been.

When she was awake, Evangeline thrived. Before the Vale detour, she worked so many jobs they all had more bits than they could spend. She made greater efforts to eat, hard going though it appeared to Max, and even offered food they could share: sliced, browning mock apples in p-free butter, popped tobaccorn with Purpleberry Munch tossed about in its bowl. 

She liked to hear him read from any book he brought to her, and asked for it often. He was more than happy to practice that particular skill. And if she dozed during his performance, after some tense consideration, Max deduced he was not offended but charmed, because she was comforted as much by his voice as his hand stroking her arm, holding her close.

She wanted to arm wrestle him, and strong and tall as she may have been, Max knew there was no chance of her victory—but he would never demur from direct challenge. When he beat her soundly, immobilizing her smooth, soft arm against the desk, she begged mercy, and rebounded, and offered thumbs to wrestle instead. There she lost, again, her short thumb pinched and pinned in a moment, laughing at his hard-set jaw, his determined, and ultimately successful, attack.

She told him she dreamed about him—that she came upon him in the middle of a dusty, broken road in the dark, and he was wearing only a pair of shredded underwear that for all the colony looked as though a rapt had got into his traveling bag, but as soon as she laughed, she realized that was all she had on, too. 

They were nowhere near bored with each other in their bed. They talked, in nearly equal amount, or sat quiet in the ship-hum, watching out her window. 

It was something like the woman she might have been on Earth, so long ago. Whole and alive. _Those_ moments trapped him. 

Yet the blanks came faster and more frequent. Short, but piercing. Whatever Welles promised, Max saw the truth: this thing had not improved, or dissipated, and Evangeline had begun not to bother herself over when or whether it happened. She was used to it now, and let the blankness take her. 

In the sober moments, Evangeline still listed her remembrances. There was luxury and light, laughter among crowds, which only lead to her lonesomeness. 

And if he never quite caught her own part in these scenes, where she fit among friends or family, or even long-lost lovers—an item which should have clutched at his ear, if no other facts did? Max only listened piecemeal, now. He wanted to hear her speak, to feel that low, cold voice shiver through him, but what she _said_ grew less urgent to his understanding. He no longer cared to collect her memories and lay them together like scraps of torn paper, shredded in anger. He cared that she was awake, and alive. As long as she was that, he was satisfied. 

If she was not, it was some mistake in both their paths, which needed correction. 

  
\---

  
The crew gathered in the galley, as they always did: the ready provisions of free liquor at hand appointed it a favored spot for those who didn't disapprove of company with their drinking. Nor should such a one mind the radio, ever tuned to a blusterous Byzantium broadcast of inane serials, punctured by promotions and product placement. The crowd and cacophany both gave Max a headache, and he was disinclined to follow Evangeline to the long table, to join any type of party, sedate and slow though it may have been. 

But he was more reluctant to leave her to her own affairs. There was a fear in him. Yes, he could admit that, to himself. What he feared he could not name. Only that _knowing,_ with _certainty,_ what befell her kept that fear from surfacing, from allowing him to see it in clear light. 

Talk turned to the current radio drama, and from there, to aetherwave. Mr. Millstone and Miss Holcomb, either befuddled by wine or their childish sincerity, reenacted a vapid scene from a recent episode of _True Romantic Tales of the Space Guard._ It ended in a cliffhanger, with "Jeremy" (Miss Holcomb, in a stuttering performance which seemed, in quality, on par with the real thing) trapped in a mechanical charging pod, while his hapless if noble partner "Tanner" (Millstone, who padded his part with brainless machismo) promised to save him from a cold, electrified fate. 

Contrary to his intent, Max listened to every preposterous word, though his gaze rested mostly upon Evangeline, who poured Iceberg Aged over ice, and watched the play unfold with a grin. She had no attachment to these stories, he knew, and forgot them as soon as they left her hearing. In his perception, she had no attachment to anything, save for the canid and, perhaps, himself. 

It was the way he had always hoped to be, to become: free of all the dark knots which entangled and trapped him in wanting and anger. Hence Max's desperate search for Bakonu's truth. Hence the punishment required on Monarch, for Max to correct the wrong done to him. 

The others, however, loved their serials and stories. Miss Holcomb might propose a tale for one to view, and in the suggestion spoil the plot with flushed enthusiasm. For someone like her, it was assumably harmless entertainment, and yet... Max's disdain for them was more than a matter of taste. 

Tossball, as a diversion, held natural truths. It gave proof to articles of faith—it required survival over weakness, an order and a process, quantifiable actions and results. Serials, on the other hand, were fictions, predicated on untruths and playacting. Regardless of their Board-certified messaging, they belied that moral cover with romanticized misdeeds, and inspired such fervor that Max wondered whether there was a temple to Halcyon Helen somewhere on Terra 2. 

Dr. Fenhill, curiously, appeared to share his loathing, half-watching the proceedings wearing a curdled scowl. "It's not my most hated. That'd be that awful hospital show," she said snarling, and chased the words with a slug of whiskey. "But all of them irritate me like canid spit." 

Miss Holcomb, breathless from her rare turn in the spotlight, shrugged amiably and flopped into a chair. "Oh, I know, they're silly. And it kinda gets you— well, if you think too much on how hard things are for regular folk, like in Edgewater..." Her voice trailed and trembled, her brow creased, then her eyes found Max. "What do you think, Vicar? Is it—"

"The people who make these things," Dr. Fenhill interrupted, leaning over the table, "don't care about _regular folk."_ She twanged her voice into a ungenerous imitation of Miss Holcomb, who—to her credit—didn't flinch. "They want to be seen and they want to make bits. And that's _fine,_ but they'd only piss on you if you were drowning." She fell back into her chair. Her words, and her gaze, swam with drink.

Another kind of captain might lay a hand in the middle to defuse what could be a loose explosive. Not the one who sat beside Max, whiskey glass in hand, eyes wide on Fenhill. Perhaps another kind of vicar might do the same, but his attention was on Evangeline. She blinked, her mouth fell open. He gripped tight around her soft arm, as he'd done over and over when she rolled atop him, or he crushed her against the bulkhead to take her from behind—but there was no desire in this. 

"They got a job to do, Ellie." Millstone's muted response was uncharacteristically cautious. Max wondered what it took to quiet him so and if it could be done with any consistency. "Like a lot of folk. Just 'cause the Board censors 'em don't mean we can't have fun with what we get. It ain't hurtin' you." 

Dr. Fenhill snorted her loud, judgmental snort, an ugly noise. "Keep telling yourself whatever it takes. People in Byzantium look down on everybody else. Quite literally." She tipped her glass back, and her head to catch whatever was left. There was hardly a drop. "They don't even pretend not to see what goes on in Halcyon, you know. They see it all. It's just that they like it that way. Isn't that right, Vicky?" 

She fixed him with a pointed stare. Max felt Evangeline's arm twitch in his grip. The air was sour with old wine and mechanical cleaning agents and the unmistakable, bitter note of disdain. At times, like this, confined ship-life made for spats and poor neighbors, though increasingly, despite differences and arguments, the complement liked each other. But none of them truly liked him. 

"I wouldn't know," he said absently. "I've never been to Byzantium." 

"It is," Millstone chimed in. "It's the black heart of the oppressor class, is what I heard. And the church keeps it that way, too." While Fenhill's bitterness was surely the product of too much whiskey poured over some old wound she kept hidden, it was inevitable young Millstone couldn't keep quiet for long. Max was in no mood to debate the prosperity of faith with any of them. 

Certainly not now, when his mind was on Evangeline, and her cold skin under his palm, and the way her eyes, her mouth, seemed to set in pain and alarm at this conversation. She had no input herself—not unusual, for she was a woman of few words—but she was listening. And she did not like what she heard. 

"But that don't got nothing to do with serials," Millstone went on. "That's art."

While Dr. Fenhill laughed sharp and mean, everyone else looked away: Millstone at his scuffed boots, Miss Holcomb at a wrench she turned over in her stained hands, Evangeline at some unseen spot in the air. And Max at Evangeline, watching the way her face changed and slacked from that tight panic to... nothing. 

His hold on her arm tightened, and he shook, hoping to wake her from the blank before it settled. He said her name aloud. It was such a shamefully intimate gesture, in front of the others, that his face warmed. There was no effect from it in her, however. Her hand fell limp and open around her wet whiskey glass. Her head slowly slumped forward to stare at her lap. 

Max shook and spoke again, and again. Until her arm was red in his grip, until he heard Miss Holcomb call his name from some muted distance, until Millstone kicked his chair and snapped _leave her alone, preacher,_ and Max's own hand loosed and let go, lest he drag her, dreaming, to the floor. 

  
\---

  
There were times Max's intervention worked to his wished-for outcome. They were rare, and private, but Evangeline was not grateful. She didn't thank him or evince relief, but no more did she complain. She blinked awake, and went on as though nothing happened. For her, perhaps, nothing had. She was not the one who waited and watched herself barely breathe, or who bore a previously piercing intellect turned dull and disoriented on this one thing, a thing that was not what it should be. In so many ways. 

Max had only been relieved that such spells didn't surface while they fucked. No matter what he knew of her condition, no matter his concern for her, it was an imagined humiliation and horror he was happy to never have faced. 

Until, of course, he did. 

There was nothing quite so cold as that. Her limp, dead heaviness and numb limbs. Her flat, black, lifeless eyes. And the sweat on his skin which iced in an instant, as though he had woken from a dream of her, a trance of his own, and found himself in bed with a corpse.

What would have, in saner frame of mind, frightened him away, given him the pause he required to reassess, to resurrect his work—it only compelled him closer. Like a child to a noxious flower. A canid to spoiled meat. 

Max was not a gentle lover, and that fact had seemed to suit his partner's taste. And so he employed the same tactics in his checks upon her. If her eyes fluttered shut, if her head hung back too loosely against the bed, he would knot his hands through her thick hair. He gripped skin-close at the scalp, and jerked her weak neck forward, her eyes to his own. 

_Are you awake? Are you there?_

_Yes,_ she would whisper, her low voice shivering. 

His teeth found the soft corner of her jaw and clamped savagely. The sharp lines of his fingernails cut red moons into her thighs. _Are you awake?_

A few times, it roused her. Once, the last time, it angered her. 

Evangeline seized his wrist in a bolt-tight grip and shoved his hand away. Her eyes flashed against his stare, her mouth a hard pout. 

"Yes. Stop asking. I can't do anything about it. Neither can you." 

She slid out from beneath him and sat up in their bed, the covers tangled around her feet. Flushed near red in the face, breath deep and fast. There was a heat in her. Alive, and glaring.

His heart sped and spun in his chest. "Fine," he said, hardly aware of his speech. This was what he wanted. It had become _all_ he wanted. That it felt so unsettled and raw in his stomach, that a foolish nervousness quivered in his throat—he could try to ignore these emotional waste products for a while longer. His mind cleaved in two. One half whispered his failings and his fears, his abandoned purpose, his revenge overdue. 

The other only whimpered, hungry and lonely for her touch, though his hands had hardly cooled from its absence. 

And in his own addled, soft state, Max reached for her even as she stared bullets into him. It was the beginning of a mistake. 

Evangeline did not shrink from his touch. She pulled him closer by a harsh hold on two fingers of each hand, his knuckles cracking, his wrists aching. A smooth sweep of her legs and she loomed over him. All her weight pressed his shoulders into the bed, into the floor, with her cold, tense fingers. 

"It's not fine." Her wild hair curtained her, and him, both shadowed by the tangled black. Her glinting eyes were the only light in the dark space between them. 

The thought struck Max that while he'd clawed for her living, true self, her wakeful, unclouded mind and heart, perhaps equally... there was an Evangeline he feared to know. That fear, and desire, they pooled together again, so low within him—

"Say you're sorry." There was a muffled tremble in her voice. The fingers bit into his skin like needles. 

How did he arrive here, now? Beneath her, below her. Always yearning and reaching for something intangible, despite all that his hands could feel. His focus shattered, an eyeglass fractaled into shards. She was a black cloud hovering. The farther he wandered into her fog, the more lost he became. 

"I won't," he said. "I'm not." That was something he swore he'd never say again. 

She squeezed her hands into his shoulder bones. It was a dull pain. It built into a deep throb with each pulse of his blood. Her thighs pinned his shut. 

"Then what do you want?" 

It was a broken echo. She'd asked him that the first day they met, in that sticky, salty church, before he knew she was Evangeline at all. Then, her frozen voice had been raw and flat, robotic as an mechanical, deep with icy intrigue. Now... there was only pained confusion. Anger in the undernote, he knew that well. 

Max wanted so many things from her. He wanted her to be an answer to his questions—questions she could barely parse the words to understand. Some part of him must have wanted her to be an end to all this failed striving. Else why would he persist in pursuing her? Burying himself within her, literally enough, and ignoring every other passion? 

But the first thing he'd wanted from her, that same day in Edgewater, was the book, and the book had become the locus around which every failure and false start revolved. There was only one path which would recenter him, and he already had the coordinates to follow it. That future would not find him in her bed, or her arms, and he had known that from the beginning.

"I want to go to Monarch. So let me go." What he'd meant to sound defiant mumbled out of him, weak and washed-out.

It was too dark to see her face. Only her eyes blinked, the point of light in them vanished. The force lifted from his shoulders. The black drew back. 

She sat, arms folded on her knees, in the corner of the flat mattress nearest her berth. Her hair draped across her, in shadow, so he could only see her toes twitch, and her back shudder.

Some urge rose up in Max to unask that request. To crawl closer, and brush back the waves which hid her face, and pooled over her arms like wet weeds. To tell himself that whatever he was at the moment—his ignorance and anger, his need—was enough. To tell Evangeline she was not some unsolvable equation, some mutant anomaly who required attending, or adjustment. Just a woman, one which he desperately—

But, of course, he did none of those things. He couldn't really believe any of that. There was something unchangeable about it all. The hard snap of the Plan shifting back into a tight line.

He raised his stiff body from the bed and slipped on his clothes. He left her there, cold and alone, as she must have been on the Hope, left to her memory, if memories and consciousness slowed in that state like her sickness, like those blank, dead moments. 

He held the door open, for the waiting canid to canter in on clicking claws. 

And Max gathered from the galley what he might need to sequester himself, to ignore all distractions. He had his work waiting. 

Silent for days afterward, he only saw his shipmates, save one, in the hall near the bathroom, or in the galley when he restocked. He heard, in passing, what Evangeline pursued. Her mysterious junk-stockpiling trips. Her quiet ransacking of the ruins. The hoard began to spread across the ship. The SAM unit fussed loudly at bottles and boots left haphazard in every corner. Its own storage box brimmed with those cracked service medals, more crammed in each time Max passed. 

Which he tried not to do, if he could help it. He kept his door shut. He studied and scribbled and stared through the filmy shutters into the surrounding space. His anger grew hard and tight as a knotted muscle. It was not focused upon her, or even himself. It was all the ordained, Planned proceedings which culminated in this moment. The research. The tribunal. The prison. The book. Who led him to it. 

He understood why, to the layman, to the uneducated or the dissolute dissident, all seemed to stem from chaos. The Plan was not benevolent. The Plan tossed him violently from pain to pain. It would take the rest of his life to correct it. 

Another week passed before the ship shuddered into skip again. All the time, Max, despite his straining effort, watched his door. He guessed that, eventually, Evangeline would come for him. Would ask for him. Would grip him by the collar and drag him behind her, to shut him in her quarters, to surrender to the cold bliss of her body and turn off his boiling brain. He would protest, _no, he cannot, not anymore._ Because correction requires sacrifice. 

But she never did. It was easier that way. 

Yet after that skip, there was a hushed metallic knock upon that door. He looked up expectantly, and tempered his expression to a cool disinterest before it opened.

It was only Miss Holcomb. "Mr. Vicar, I, uh, thought you might want to know we're set to orbit Monarch in a couple hours." When he failed to respond, she ducked into the hall shadow and the door latched closed.

Monarch. Through the greasy ship shutters which marred his window, it was a smudge of orange dust. It was an unassuming speck in the looming blue shadow of Olympus. It was what he wanted. 

Life was fated, they said. And unstoppable. 


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the unfit nevertheless survive.

Blow the candle out, I don't need to see what my thoughts look like.  
― Zola

Max was instructed to wait. 

Her crew all gave him the order, in one way or another, once the Unreliable locked landing legs on Stellar Bay's pad. "Captain'll still want you," Miss Holcomb insisted, when she chanced upon him storing the armor and guns he'd been given in a hold locker. A laughable contention. She was wrong. Though she meant nothing of the kind, his mind—as ever—bent toward the more intimate mode of wanting. 

But even in the general, the evidence made plain proof of the opposite. Evangeline had gunhands and guards to spare now. She had a mission, and he had his. Their paths need not cross any longer.

Dr. Fenhill joined in the mechanic's opinion. Arms and boots crossed, cocky, she settled slanted in the hold doorway, all affected apathy. "She's headed to Fallbrook soon enough. I'm guessing you don't have the bits for transport, and you wouldn't like what you'd have to do to earn it." She summed him up with a cool once-over.

If only he were more like the image she must have conjured—an image, admittedly, he cultivated. The erudite, ambitious clergyman, with clean, soft hands better fit for welcoming tithes than breaking teeth. The doctor had no idea just _what_ he had done in this life, or how he earned what he'd gained, for good or ill. 

Mr. Millstone ventured into the township to support his captain, and passed Max without a word on the matter. The bravado in his mindless swagger was a particular irritant. Monarch, it was said, held monstrous dangers. The type only skill might subdue, not back alley tossball tricks. Evangeline never cared to be careful; the boy didn't know how. And her episodes– No matter what he was to her now, confirmation she returned intact and whole would be... welcome.

However many mangled scraps were left of Millstone at the end was irrelevant. 

So, though it only prolonged the pain, there was a sense in staying aboard until Fallbrook was in sight. Until the stench of Stellar Bay, the sea and saltuna and _sulfur,_ was long out of Unreliable range. 

He did not see Evangeline once. After a clutch of anxious days, waiting for word or for ship skip or for nothing at all, scratching into his journals with a growing disquiet, it was Millstone he saw from the desk, through the open door. He strolled back to his berth, alone, with hardly a scratch upon him. From the hallway between their rooms, he flung an overstuffed pack toward his bed, and leaned through the doorway.

"I'm tagging out. Boss says meet her at the Yacht Club." 

The pen in Max's hand fell, and missed the inkwell. Black spattered and dotted the page, a starscape in opposite. Again he felt that pull between want and fear, that stomach churn which seemed so common, since he'd met her. Max would not be able to make a quiet getaway. He would have to see her, which he wanted as much as he did not. 

He knew the response forming in his mouth was a whine, at best, but it was the only one he had. "I was waiting until we flew to Fallbrook." 

Millstone smiled, entirely too satisfied. "Looks like you're walking, preacher. Have fun." 

The young man didn't turn for his own bunk. He waited, and somehow Max was certain he waited to hear solicitous queries, casting about for any knowledge of her–all those tender, desperate traces to which a spurned lover might cling. But Max had done the spurning, if anything. Certainly he had the questions. None of the answers were ones he could stand to hear from Felix Millstone. 

Max stood, scraping his chair, with all the unaffected calm he could muster. "What's it like out there?" he asked. 

"Pretty bad if you ain't ready." The shadows under his eyes, and the hard way he held his shoulders belied Millstone's own attempt at indifference. "But I kicked a few mant heads clean off. It's a skill." 

_Most assuredly,_ Max thought, and moved to gather his traveling pack, his toiletries, his toothbrush. He took his cassock and collar from a drawer. Scrubbed, smoothed, scrupulously folded. It looked new again. Months since he'd worn it, it _felt_ new in his hands.

"Boss hired a hunter who knows her way around. I guess they'll do the work so you can keep your fancy clothes spic and span." 

"Ah, and I suppose that's why you're back so soon." Max lay the garment at the bottom of the pack and looked up. "They tired of carrying the load. Dead weight gets cut, son. Even a Rangers fan should know that." 

Evidently too tired to respond with more than an eyeroll, Millstone turned away, though Max was sure he heard a muttered _get spaced, fucker._ It was just as well. He was not up to verbal sparring, even with such a wide advantage over his opponent. 

He blew the ink-stained journal pages dry and capped the ink. The rest of his room was bare now. His books, his carpet and flag, all had been boxed in the hold and marked as his possessions. They'd be sent for, once he found his next destination. Once he found what he was looking for. 

But the two journals—his own, and Bakonu's—he carried close. A few other books he held back, for one could never be entirely without books. Some small effects he also kept from storage: the bright blue prayer beads, the golden pyramid, the old pocketwatch which ticked softly by his side. 

It was not until these things were set together, alone in the empty room, that he realized _she_ had given him every single one. 

  
\---

  
It was night when Max exited the airlock and stepped into Stellar Bay. One half of the sky sat removed, hidden by the swirling smear of Olympus, the gray-gold storms fighting each other across its hot surface. The other half was the dullest star-filled space one could imagine. A flat, faded black, punctured with holes. 

The flickering sign for the Yacht Club buzzed dead ahead of the landing platform. He avoided it, and walked the soggy tile streets to gain his shore legs. To give himself time.

Every building, it seemed, bore bright red shelves of fungus, which clung to the outer beams like rotting banners. They gave the town its only color. The rest, even granting the dim night, was muddy and indistinct. One couldn't tell the homes from the dumpsters, nor the skittering sea rays picking at wet garbage from the garbage itself, until they were frightened into flight. 

The saltuna stockyard, with its water towers and open, pungent trawling bay, sat silent against the vast expanse of the black sea beyond. There was a rough, sandy wind that punched in sharp puffs, full of grit and crane oil and sour salt. 

The place was too much like Edgewater. It was too much like every pit in the colony he'd ever visited. Like Salina, where he was born: where his father and mother worked the salt mines, same as everyone else, and there was no question he would follow them into those white, skyless holes for the rest of his life. 

Here were the same sore laborers with dead eyes, the same grim workclothes like the ones he wore now, the same—he was certain of it—endless days and desolate nights. And here, not even the blue shimmer of a church to break the monotony of the townscape, the metallic grime of battered cargo containers and rusted, moldy housefronts. 

In the distance, black clouds shadowed the harsh, pitted rocks of Monarch's horizon. Max wondered if they were the product of industry, some polluted refuse in the aether, or whether they had always been that way. Whether the terraformers merely extracted the poison from Monarch's bones and set it free. 

Properly curdled by his observations, his heart newly hardened, Max made his way to the Yacht Club. Once he opened the door it was clear, from the sudden pinch in his lungs, his efforts were wholly in vain. 

The two women at the bar didn't bother to turn and scout who'd entered. They teetered on tall stools, bottles in hand, slumped toward each other with sleepy, inebriated smiles. Neither looked like they belonged in that dingy, yellowed bar. They were the figures in the foreground of a periodical piece, the models meant to push the advertisement, while the mundane world faded into the background—the color and life in the promise of the product. 

Max would have bought whatever they were selling. 

The woman he didn't know was, undoubtedly, the hunter of which Mr. Millstone had spoken. Max took in the slick, padded gear she wore, the custom fit and fine details, the bright shock of magenta hair. She was drunk as a bredworm in a barrel of Tripistout, but she had a natural, if strained, grace. 

The other he knew. Never as well as he wanted. Evangeline shook her tangle of dark hair and laughed her hard, hoarse laugh. Her dark eyes were awake and shining. He followed the bent line of her back to the round, lush curve of her backside, her legs spread wide in tall boots set on the bar rail. He marveled, for a moment, at the fact that no one else in the place was staring at her. That they didn't find her to be the only thing worth looking at on the voided planet. 

But the satisfaction stopped short. Seeing her again, flushed with drink and obvious delight, a happiness he'd half-heartedly hoped she could reach only with him— Well, here was further proof of his futility to her. 

Max called forth his nerve, and his coolest temperament, to make the few short steps to the bar. Now, they saw him. Now they each reacted to his presence—the hunter with woozy wonder, Evangeline with wide eyes and a trembling breath. He avoided meeting her look directly. Somehow it stung like smoke, choked in his throat. 

"Miss Brook," he said, and the words felt old and stale. He said it instead of _Hello,_ instead of _Forgive me._ Instead of _Why did you let me walk away and why have you asked for me now?_

She only blinked, and shut her mouth tight. 

The hunter, who introduced herself by the stately appellation of Nyoka Ramnarim-Wentworth III, prevented any chance of further reunion, slight as it was.

"So _you're_ the vicar." She sized him up, and with one flare of a nostril, one subtle shift of an eyebrow, she communicated her conclusions. She had no kindness for Max, not that he expected or demanded such a reception. He only wondered what exactly she'd been told about him, whether by Millstone or even the typically taciturn Evangeline, who stared blankly between them and downed the dregs from her bottle. 

Ms. Ramnarim-Wentworth did the talking. She gave him what sounded like a rote recitation about Monarch, its designs and its dangers, from the fatal fauna to the feral marauders which roamed even those long-abandoned roads outside the city walls. 

"This place ain't for the faint of heart." She held out her hand to the bartender without looking, and it soon closed around a freshly uncorked bottle of whiskey. "We got no time for sermons and no room for folk won't get their hands dirty."

Those suspiciously clean hands, again. The punishment he planned for his arrival in Fallbrook would no doubt dirty them far worse than any scrape with monsters or marauders. And that was no concern of anyone's but his own. "Then take comfort in the knowledge that I do practice what I preach. Only the strong survive, and I mean to be among them."   
  
"That's fine to say now. I see you mean it." The hunter staggered, and steadied herself on the stool. "But out there, we work together. We don't watch each other's back, won't none of us be strong enough to make it." Her jaw clenched, and she chased away the hard, dead look which flashed in her eyes with a long pull from her bottle. 

Max felt Evangeline's eyes upon him. He dared a glance to confirm it—yes, she stared and studied just the way he would have, had he felt he could control himself. It was enough—it was _too much_ —to be near her. To catch her smoke-apple scent even in the beer-soaked bar, to hear the stool's leather creak under the weight of her legs, to feel her cool presence not two feet from his aching hands. 

"Of course," he said. "It's of the... _greatest_ importance to me that all of us remain safe. You may count upon it." 

The hunter looked over her bottle from Max to Evangeline, and back again, with the same skeptical quirk in her brow. "I can see that, too," she muttered.

  
\---

  
No time for sermons, she'd said. But the two days' and nights' hike to Fallbrook, fighting through rapts and mants and footing the noxious landscape, was survival of the fittest in action, in life. It was, in a way, spiritual. 

Max had survived brutality and banality both, whatever the human world challenged him with, and grown stronger for all of it. Now, standing naked—in metaphor only—before the unforgiving snarl of nature and forcing it to yield to higher intellect, to prove _that_ was strength, where size and venom were lesser, failing adaptations against the mind of mankind... That was something scripture never made so clear as did the piercing scream of a mantiqueen, who only wanted the meat on your bones and a place to spawn its swarm. To destroy that natural inclination with a few sharp shots from a gun? Man doth rise like a god's monolith, indeed. 

Evangeline herself was a savant here. Unskilled and unscientific in her methods, in her muddled mind, she embodied that human power. In her hard hand cannon stance, in the way she stood fast against recoil and collision alike. 

Sickness and sour stomach be damned, she was stronger now than when he'd met her. His earlier worries for her on Monarch embarrassed him. He did not need to protect her in the wilds. They were not base animals warring for mating space. 

Whatever she had been before, this suited her. Max wondered whether this wildness helped her in some way, despite the pestilent air, or if she was somehow improving. For she seemed more alert throughout the day, and only became blank at rest—in an almost normal fashion. 

He watched her all the time. His eyes were starving for her. 

But it was simpler not to speak and, for once in his Law-forsaken life, Max was unsure what to say. Evangeline, never one for effusion, said nothing to him—not when the group stopped to share a paltry excuse for a meal, not when they camped down against the sharp night wind in one uncomfortable tent, not when their eyes met over a water canteen or a box of bullets and Max had no idea what thoughts materialized behind her black stare. 

He was both obliged and off-put by the fact that they were not alone. The hunter, it seemed, was a better match for Evangeline than he would have guessed. They fell in with an ease and symmetry he never hoped to attain. 

Ms. Ramnarim-Wentworth liked her fondness for drink and mumbled conversation and long silences. Ms. Ramnarim-Wentworth enjoyed her confessional listening skills during the long, nightly recitation of dead friends and past troubles. Ms. Ramnarim-Wentworth took her blankness and sadness for granted. 

Evangeline made one direct attempt at commiseration. In the cramped, sulfur-swept tent the three shared both nights, she invoked her lost colonist compatriots still aboard the Hope. 

"They're not even dead." She stared into the blue light of a buzzing lantern, combat-carved hands clenched around a Zero Gee, a Cosmic leveled between two stiff fingers. "They're like me. Whatever I am." 

She said it with the cold, quiet hunger of someone who yearned for the silence of that frozen ship, for her atoms to stop spinning and her thoughts to pause. For someone, anyone, to understand what she was—out of place and time, a mutant even among mutations. Everything he wished she wasn't. 

Ms. Ramnarim-Wentworth did not understand. She caught Max's eye from the other side of the tent, gave him a doubtful shake of the head, and corked her final drink of the day. It sloshed and rolled beside her as she slumped down to sleep. 

He watched Evangeline from a dark corner, her smooth, pale arm raising and lowering in mechanical rhythm, her smoke catching the lantern light like a fog over the salt sea. He watched in silence until her head turned in his direction, and a shaky _hmph_ escaped him before he could bottle it. 

The lantern shadowed her eyes, but he knew they were not blank. He knew from the way she held her neck, a soft tilt back, that she wanted to say something. Nothing came. She only stared with a look he couldn't see. And he stared back waiting, ashamed of waiting, wanting to have already rolled into the far corner and pretended to sleep, grateful he hadn't, because even in her silence he sensed so much from her he could hardly fathom. 

Her harshness toward him that last night in their bed, that clawing and questioning and reticence born from rage and frustration—he understood _those_ all too well. The months he'd known her, Max had not given much thought to her feelings. He was unsure, times past, she even had any. It was a gift he envied. Emotions were one's responsibility, one's own burden, one's object-lesson in the pursuit of logic. 

And yet... why did he suffer them, _her_ agitations, as strongly now as he had then? Why was the tenderness they engendered as stubborn as a stain, near impervious to the cleansing power of reason? 

He assumed she felt little. When confronted with contrary confirmation, he was overwhelmed. He ran away. His own uncomfortable crises of feeling could not bear the added weight of hers. He would be crushed beneath those boulders. Yet here he was with her again, longing even to imagine those sentiments in the sulfurous air. 

It was terribly vexing. It was a riddle with no right answer. 

So they stared, until the faint orange glow of the Cosmic end disappeared behind her, and she reached forward between them. For one breathless moment, he thought her hand moved toward him. Then the lantern clicked off, and there was nothing he could see in the black tent, no pale hand or dark eyes or softly sloped neck. He only heard her turn onto her side, as he had so many times beside her. Now he kept his distance, the empty space between them wide enough not to know her cool skin, not to become caught in her tangles. 

Her scent, though. It reached him through the dark. It snaked into his dreams and lulled him to a deeper sleep. 

  
\---

  
They'd stopped in the shadow of a looming brown fungus—while Max shook the yellow dust from his hair, and swabbed the salt from his face in the hopes of tasting just a little less in his mouth—when the hunter asked to leave. 

Ms. Ramnarim-Wentworth wanted to double back toward the empty crossroads some meters past, outside the gate which, thank the Architect, kept hidden the squalid, unstable Philosophist cult who supposedly squatted there. "Got some back pay waiting from an old job," she explained. "Besides, we're getting dry, and they got a bar their people don't hardly use. You should be clear up ahead for a ways. SubLight keeps a guard on this side of the wall, just in case." 

Evangeline emptied a canteen and appeared to consider the proposition. Max, for his part, was horrified. Though which aspect of the proffered scheme caused him more trepidation—that monsters may lay in wait ahead of them, or the notion of a painfully silent, if safe, walk alone with Evangeline—it was impossible to say.

"Regardless of whatever protection the salvagers provide, and my guess at its quality is feeble at best," he said, "were you not hired to guide and protect us through Monarch? And you would abandon that position, and _us,_ with hardly a care?"

The women shared a look, an unspoken confusion. 

"Well, no," Ms. Ramnarim-Wentworth began, as though he'd confirmed he was the absolute fool she surmised. "You see, I was hired to take _her_ to Devil's Peak. That's been done. Joining up with Cap here after was my choice. And I don't think you have much say in all this, do you?" She stepped out of the shadow and squinted into the hazy sunlight drowned by Olympus, the sky glutted with yellow clouds. 

"How much farther?" Evangeline asked, her ragged voice dry as his throat felt in all this wind and salt. 

"To Fallbrook? 'Bout 1800 meters, straight down this road." 

Max sighed. "If it's so short, why not come with us? We must watch each other's backs, as you said." 

"Did I say that?" The hunter crouched, flipped around her rucksack and peered inside. She reached in and tossed Evangeline a box of ammunition. The matter seemed settled for both of them, despite no voiced endorsement. 

"No need to be so scared, Vicar." Ms. Ramnarim-Wentworth was either unskilled or uninterested in real reassurance, because the amusement in her voice was evident. "Mants don't spawn down here, and they don't travel. Unless there's been an ion storm. Then they get spooked." She shouldered her sack and stepped close. "But it's been a few days since the last one," she said, with a hard clap on his shoulder. "You'll be fine."

"If it's drink you're after, I understand there's plenty to intoxicate yourself with in the settlement." This final attempt was unconvincing even to his own ears, but she was right: part of him did fear what came next, whether on the road or in the town, and prudence suggested safety in numbers. 

She only laughed. "Sure. Overpriced, watered-down. Tourist trade. They bank on the Byzantines not having any sense." 

Scanning the horizon at their back, she edged toward the roadway, shading her eyes. "Those fools just want to pay too much to get bombed, maybe see a shoot 'em up in the dust. Once in a while SubLight puts on a show for them, somebody they want to take out anyway. Most of the time, worst thing you might see is sprat shit in new and exciting places." 

Evangeline gave a slow wave goodbye. It was a charming gesture, if somewhat robotic. The hunter promised to meet them in Fallbrook. And Max stopped his sputtering, his undignified demands. 

He'd meant what he said at the Yacht Club. Nothing here would break his resolve—not changes in plans, not awkward discomfort, not his own misguided contrition. Certainly not his erstwhile lover, this woman who hardly left his thoughts, the one he tried his hardest to ignore despite how much he wanted her. 

It was a failure as a method of self-preservation. 

His only consolation was that she fastened on her helmet and snapped the visor shut before she turned to him and asked, muffled and low, "Are you ready?" 

No. He was as unready for the moment in which he found himself as he had ever been. Yet he wrenched on his own too-tight helmet and strapped on his heavy pack. She led the way, out into the sun and dust, down the eerily intact and empty road, in customary silence. A silence he found maddening. 

And up sprung the greatest compulsion to speak he'd felt in weeks, the shapes of words merging in his mouth in a mass. Yet what would he say? There were no genuine apologies to make or rationalizations to offer. He only wanted what he wanted: to make his way toward his bloody, fated outcome and be free to do so, and to have her, the way she was before. 

He should never have pried into her mind. He should have accepted, with praise and deference, the gifts of her body and her blank affections, taken her solicitations for his service as the surface-shallow advances he imagined. Or if he gave her any correction or inquiry, he might have kept those talks trivial, too—the glib, half-hearted counsel of a preoccupied vicar to his tiresome flock. 

Then the contentious questioner, the angry, ocean-mad seeker with the breathless glare and hard eyes—that would be an Evangeline he'd never met. There would be one less struggle to suffocate his sensibility. 

About the safety of the short walk, Ms. Ramnarim-Wentworth was half-correct. There _were_ no beasts of the mantisaur family to contend with on the path to Fallbrook. The wall around the settlement came into sight, the way curved and sloped downhill. The low depression between the two of them and the gate, surrounded by a squat row of ruins, showed itself as they reached the crest of the road. What it showed was that the way ahead was not clear. 

There were five sleeping raptidons, acid drool pooling beneath their open mouths and scarring the dry grass. And at the center of the group, the largest rapt Max had ever seen. Lurid orange, it was big as a shipping pod and twice as long, with a hard whip-club of a tail. It also dozed, twitching and fitful, its tail spikes as long and sharp as its teeth.

Max halted on the hilltop and yanked off his helmet. "We have to go back," he hissed. He took hold of her shoulder before he realized what he was doing. The metal mesh of her armor plate under his glove was nothing like touching her soft body, but the closeness matched a more natural contact. He lifted his hand from her, in case she swatted it away. 

Evangeline, helmet tight and visor-hidden, stared ahead at the roadway. She turned, slowly, to look at him—he assumed. By verity, it was not unlike the way she looked at him un-helmeted, for how poorly he had always read her vacant expressions, or known what was or wasn't in her eyes. The opportunity to attempt it again would have been preferable. As it was, Max hoped against hope she would listen to sense and seek the hunter's help at the other settlement, Philosophists be damned. 

Sense had never won out with her before. It seemed the threat of imminent dismemberment would not exhort her to hear its call. She turned back to the road, searched around in her low-slung pack for bullets, and cocked her long gun with a dull snap. 

Then she headed diagonal-right, to the wall side of the road, with no more stealth than a forward tacking into the Tuesday zone. 

After Max's fervent, mental willing for her to turn back failed, there was nothing he could do but squeeze on his own helmet and follow.

She did, unexpectedly, slink low into the brown grasses which lined the roadway to hide herself. His crouched, stiff body made an effort to emulate her. The tall stalks whipped around him and struck his armor in soft thwaps. He kept a shaded eye on the rapts, but it was an onerous task. His helmet fogged with his rising, rattling breath. They may have continued to sleep soundly. They may have sniffed the air and kicked their feet out in readiness to strike. 

Or, not. It was difficult to tell. With his shotgun held in pose to fire, with his bad knee burning from the crawl, with the mental marks of her trail fading as the grass curtained behind her, and the heat fog, and the rapts snorting—Max had reached his limit of processable stimuli. 

That was, until the growl. Until the guttural shriek, and the clash of razored teeth biting the air were all he could hear. Then, the barrage of rushing quadrupedal feet. Those he felt. 

Max bolted. Evangeline was ahead, somewhere, and though his spatial senses were stunted by the helmet, his quick calculations on the size and speed of the creatures told him they were far enough to get in a few shots before they sprung. Before they struck. 

When he stood above the grass, he saw her, that long gun readied and aimed angle-left, downhill toward the stampede. She took two hard shots before he even leveled his own gun to fire. It was a solace, then, and a joy, to feel the recoil jerk in his bones after every trigger pull. To hear the squelch and rip of bullet through rapt hide, over and over.

The rapts ran on. Even the smallest took a surge of rounds to kill. The oversized one, it didn't run like the rest, sprinting toward death or dinner with an instinctual madness. It stalked forward, its colossal mouth opened to hiss and spit. Untroubled by the dubious shots they took from afar. Unfazed even by those which pierced its heavy body. 

The others, they jumped and swung their spiked tails. They spit their rancid bile as far as it could throw. The stuff caught his armor at the thigh, and a catch was enough to scorch. Black holes melted into the scratched metal plate. 

Max's dodge was not what it used to be. Once he could sprint through any line of attack, weave and cut to every opening, and make the Monday line untouched. But he was older and softer now, and these monsters were not seminary schoolboys or scrawny convicts. They were driven by stronger urges than pride: hunger, and survival. There was something pure about it. Disgusting, but pure. 

As one of the rapts rounded, Evangeline kicked. Her bronze boot struck its jaw with a round, hollow thud. The blow stunned the thing enough to let her shove her weapon barrel-down to the sharp crest of its skull. She gave it three deafening slugs to the brain. The rapt slumped, tongue and drool spilling at her feet. 

Only the large one was left. They had an advantage, Max hoped, atop the hill. A clear firing line down, and the steep slope a potential wall the raptidon, at its size, couldn't climb. He fired as fast he could reload, and each pull of the shotgun rang through his helmet with a shattering blast that trembled in his teeth. 

Her shots came faster, until she switched to an electrified pistol. Its rounds sparked and sizzled. The air around them stunk with singed sulfur and raw rapt offal. The salt-fish of Edgewater was a welcome memory by contrast. 

They slowed the beast, but they did not stop it. Even the hill was no great barrier, for it scrambled up and stripped the grass with its feet. Stones and dust toppled in its wake. It shook its head, the flanges, the long tongue, whipping. It only screamed at the persistent bullets, as though they were merely a nuisance—like mantiswarm flies, losing their venomous stingers in its thick hide, dying for nothing. 

It clawed over the ridge with ease. It sprinted straight, the storm of bullets striking the hard scales, the spinal joint of its tail, with a dozen splintering snaps. But still it came, until a shot from Max struck it dead in the eye. Ruptured, the thick humor spurted in a slimy arc. The rapt roared and tore in the dirt. And, in an instant, it changed course—directly for him. 

The ground shuddered. So did Max's hands, as he fumbled to reload. He backed away blindly, quicker than his feet seemed capable, kicking dust to the edge of the hill, into his visor. 

The shells shunted into the barrel. The bolt clicked shut. The raptidon charged, and he raised the shotgun to fire again through the cloud of dust, retreating, racing to put room between himself and the beast. 

There was a sharp twist in his ankle. His heel rolled on a rock. 

Both boots left the ground. His center of gravity spun. His shoulders hit the dirt first. Then his ass. A harsh collapse that left him choking for air, ears ringing. His finger pulled the trigger on impact. The shot flew somewhere into the sky, useless. 

Max wrenched off his helmet, to try to breathe, in time to see the rapt barreling his way, through the dust. 

It never reached him. Evangeline flung herself between them, and stood tall and solid before the beast. She stabbed at it with a vivid red blade. Sliced into the leathery folds of its neck with a burning he could smell. Jabbed at its squat front legs. Thrust at its teeth—the sword clanged and jittered. The beast snorted, snarling. It lunged backward. Its heavy tail whipped forward, whistling in the air. 

The sound when it hit her was— It was a flat, pulverizing slap. It made the sick rise in Max's throat. 

He cried out for her. He screamed _No_ —but already she was falling. Her limp body dragged downhill with the loose rocks and torn grass. 

He clambered to his feet and ran, tripping and tumbling down the same slope. 

Evangeline lay at the bottom, in the shadow of a line of ruined prefabs. Unmoving, crumpled, legs curled beneath her. Max took her in his arms, slid back the visor on her helmet. The dark eyes were open, skin pale and cold—which was no indication and no relief. 

He stripped off his gloves and dug his fingers beneath the helmet, cursing incessantly, soaked in a sudden, icy sweat. 

There, at her throat, was that pulse he always looked for. It wasn't weak or shallow like he feared—it throbbed, hard and hot. Steady. He felt her breath upon his hands. Blank, then. Not— 

He laughed. He'd never been grateful for that blankness. Now, it was a beautiful thing. A gift, to see her black eyes wide and watering, barely blinking. 

Max groped for her medical inhaler, wedged it inside the visor opening, and squeezed the pump. The bulb filled with Adreno mist, then emptied—she inhaled erratically. He vaguely wondered if this would break her episode, if he should have tried it months ago. But she remained still, her eyes static. He pumped again, and again, watching the ridge for shadows. For claws. 

He heard the heavy footsteps roaming the hilltop, but nothing came. 

Hooking his arms under hers, he muttered, "Sorry about this," and towed her through the dirt, her pack and weapons carving lines in the dust. They caught on clumps of dead-dry bush and the ridge of the prefab porch onto which he pulled her. Max kicked his hard armored boot behind him, and the door pitched back, clanging against whatever was left inside. When no shot sounded from any squatter, when he didn't hear the mad grumblings of a roused marauder, he deemed it safe enough to proceed. 

Inside, he maneuvered her legs around the door, slapped it shut, and surveyed the space. It was sizable and safe and seemed mostly unsullied by sprats or stinking bodies. Around a tall plexi partition was a bathroom and a bed, a wide one on an iron frame, with a mattress and blankets, like the one they used to share. Max brushed aside the sharp stir in his chest at the thought and hauled her around the divider, lifting her awkwardly, rolling her onto the bed. 

Then he stood, and breathed. Blood and air flooded and shuddered through him, as though he had been the one down and dead for these past dreadful minutes. 

Max had no clue what to check on her person for internal injury. His education in the practical sciences was, frankly, pathetic—they'd been deemed unnecessary for true scholars. Apt to cloud the mind with useless minutiae and worthless application. The strong survived. That was the order of things. 

There were times on Tartarus one needed the knowledge of a doctor, and always one, with doubtful diagnoses perhaps, was nearby. Yet, now, he was alone. If there was a terminal here, he could contact Dr. Fenhill for advice. Or he could run to the gate, where surely the visiting Byzantines had installed a physician to soothe their indulgences. 

The gate. The quiet outside. He cracked the door. Beyond the porch, the roadway was shadowed. The rapt had come down. It sniffed and pawed, lumbering into the grass and across the road tiles, searching for its escaped prey. 

It might find them in the prefab, even with the door sealed, if there were any holes or drafts, if its sense of smell was as good as Max feared. It might butt the door with its head or slice open the flimsy metal wall with its tail. And they would be stuck there, like saltuna in a can. 

A proactive move was the only logical option. With no promised SubLight guard to eradicate the threat, with none of Ms. Ramnarim-Wentworth's skill or knowledge, without even Evangeline's wild attacks, her frantic, violent impulses, Max was on his own. And whatever myriad failings he embodied as a vicar, as a son, as a shipmate or a lover—he could fight. 

He wouldn't let Evangeline come to such a sorry end, a monster's meal in a rusty ruin. He wouldn't let himself die here. Not without making this beast sorry it had ever hatched.  
  
His bulging travel pack sat forgotten on the floor. Inside were his extra weapons and ammunition, his personal items, his cassock, his gifts from her. Slotted into a pocket was what he wanted now: compacted shut, painted red shaft, sharp net head bloodstained and ready. He opened it to its full length: 1.25 meters, thin and hard. This tossball stick was the only thing he'd retained from Tartarus. The only physical thing. It kept him safe there. It kept him sane. 

He pressed open the door, and stepped onto the porch. The beast skulked at the hill-end of the road, and paused when it heard Max, its ear flanges rippling. It shuffled its feet to turn, and charged in an orange flash. 

Max sprinted into the roadway, just past the running rapt. It swiped, and missed, as it sped past and twisted to attack. He met it head on, with two determined cracks to one of the flopping ears, one hit to the mouth. Then he ran back across the road, before he could see the damage, before the tail could spin to find him. 

Its blind side kept it slow. Max pounced, straight toward the dead eye, and hammered the stick across its face. He aimed for the seeing eye, pounding as fast as he could, before he fled again. The rapt screamed and spit, but Max was already behind it, back of the tail's reach and circling to clip the front leg. To find its bones at the center of that thick wall of hide and meat. 

His thoughts were not empty, nor overrun with animalistic fervor. Max considered Evangeline, who put herself in danger to save him from this very creature. Mindlessly made herself a target, a possible victim. It may have been magnanimous. It was also stupid. The undead woman ready to die again.

He bashed at the beast in a way he hadn't done since the Labyrinth: a full-body manic chop. A blow meant to maim. He swung the stick with all his strength and some which seemed to materialize from nothing, until the rapt's shriek rounded to reach him, and he raced to its face again, cleaving into the eye. 

To die for someone else was the height of foolish, Philosophism-addled drivel which not even the most immoral serial would suggest. The idea was not noble to Scienticians. It was traitorous for the colony. To kill for someone, though, to make their survival your mission—that was the ultimate romantic declaration, in line with principled practice. The order demanded it. 

I've deemed you the fittest. You must survive with me. 

Sweat matted his hair and dripped into his own eyes. His breath was shallow and grasping. Still, he beat the rapt rhythmically, recklessly—in the legs, in the teeth, in the one eye which remained—until his arms cramped. 

Evangeline was not fit. Not mentally, not spiritually. Yet he decided she was necessary. They were connected, even if the connection was frayed, and troublesome, and vexatious. It had not been severed. 

He wouldn't die for her. But, oh, he would kill for her. With a singular pleasure.

The raptidon reared and stumbled. Its tongue unfurled, acid green. Night-blue blood streamed from its shredded eye. Max ran from the swerve of the flying tail, down the roadway, in line with the Fallbrook gate, past the last derelict prefab. It whined and shook its head, blood spraying, taking unsuccessful sniffs with its broken snout. 

If Max had been more audacious, or less anxious, less anesthetized by fear, he would have cursed, or laughed out loud. He'd done it. He'd blinded the thing. He'd cracked its skull and mangled its limbs. It was at its own end, not his, and not hers. He could finish it now, if he had a gun. Yet all the guns were inside. 

He walked as softly as heavy armor allowed back to the house. The plastic porch's faux-wood planks cracked beneath his boots. The smashed face must have dulled its remaining senses, for the beast hardly shifted its head in his direction. It was lost in its pain. 

Max unsealed the door, and returned with his shotgun. It only took a few rounds, this time, to down the thing for good. Its body sank onto the dry grass with a weighty thud. 

Back inside, he heard a stirring. Gun loaded, heart thrashing, he poked into dark, empty corners at the prefab's rear, ready to keep killing. But the noise continued, a scraping of metals, a muffled fuss. He rounded the partition, and only then did he lower his gun. 

Evangeline was waking. Whether the fight outside provoked her, or it was the natural end to her injury-induced episode, she sat on the bed, its frame groaning with her movements, her fingers tight under the helmet like his own had been, just a short time ago. 

He sent the gun skittering across the floor and knelt at the beside. He unhooked the helmet from her chin, and eased it tenderly from her head. Blood caked at the corner of her mouth. Her cheek swelled, bloomed with blue bruises. The sheen of sweat glistened along her nose and brow, in the way he'd thought of her once before: the heroine who endured, if worse for wear. 

"Are you all right?" he asked. 

She seemed to search, unfocused, until she saw him. She huffed a shaky breath and nodded. "I think so," she whispered. 

Max took her face in his hands. His fingers shook on her jaw, his own tight and hard as a closed fist, his teeth grinding. He looked into her eyes—the black depths, the marbled blood-brown, awake, alive—and he wanted to scream. Something in him wished he could cry. 

He couldn't remember the last time he'd wept. Surely it was for himself, whatever pitiful state or situation he'd found himself in at that place and time: Salina, seminary, tribunal, Tartarus. There were plenty from which to choose. 

But tears and choked throats did not come naturally to Max, even before his meditations and methods of reason endeavored to dull his reflexive reactions. Anger, lashing out—that had always been his emotional vice of choice. It was an indulgence a solitary man might freely entertain. A man with someone in his life, someone who exposed him, uncovered all his tattered, threadbare tenderness—he might find it a refuge, and a shield. 

Imagining what might have happened to her, what she had done for him— That instead of walking beside her through that gate into Fallbrook, he might have been carrying her corpse— 

Max let go of her. He stood up, unbuckled the armor's latch at his neck, and shook his head, scowling. 

"Architect have mercy," he muttered. "You don't possess a lick of sense." 


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which nothing is truly transparent.

He saw that it was an ironical thing for him to be running thus toward that which he had been at such pains to avoid.  
― Stephen Crane

With the street beyond the sealed door empty of all but a raptidon’s corpse, with the bedlam of Fallbrook locked behind thick walls, with Monarch’s weather stagnant as its cloudy pools of acid and just as foul, silence prevailed in the prefab. It was split only by the clang and creak of Max’s armor, as he unhooked each lock and let the pieces fall.

And in his head, the rumble and buzz of wrath barely satisfied.

He’d rounded the plexi half-wall and left Evangeline to the bed, while he gathered himself. He’d turned, even, to face away, while he stripped down. Nothing ached or screamed inside him— _yet._ Battle and anger drugged him, so he was painless and startlingly awake. Soon, it would fade, and soon he would hurt with such ferocity that crumpling into a dusty corner among abandoned crates might seem a comfort.

The bed would be hers. With his limited skill, he would tend to her, if it was necessary. By the Architect, he hoped it would not be.

Max snuck a quick look. She barely moved, still waking, still navigating her own injuries, assessing her afflictions from internal estimation. His rancor and critique, the venom he leveled at her before he turned to undress, left little impression upon her. One barely perceptible tweak of her jaw. A twitch beneath her eye, a look which hardened ever so briefly before it softened into a vague and distant stare.

Near-death experiences, it seemed, would not be followed by reckonings or reunions. Not for those who were unsure of their living status at the most stable of times.

There was more than broken armor and slim screens, more than mangled metal and paint-chipped dents, between Max and Evangeline. If the only things which separated them were cracked and warped bits of plate, he might have found it simple to snap them clear at their fissured joints and toss them to the floor, the way he discarded own damaged gear.

But there were other barriers, unspoken and unscalable. Transparent, like the plexi he peered through again, to allow him to view her all he wanted. Yet he could not find his way around or over.

She sank into the sagging bed with a faraway gaze, absently plucking at the buckles which bound the patchwork suit—a jumble of burnished bronze and brash purpleberry—to her body.

He’d noted more than once that no armor could fully obscure that body from his eye, fueled by memory which invoked all his other sensory recollections. Her scent—that mock apple tart, smoke swirl, frost-sugar dust—stayed with him always, but the rest were never far.

The enveloping indulgence of her hips, of her arms, that _took_ all the force of his fingers and _gave_ itself anew, the red press of his hands fading into her cold, pale skin. The hard pulse and soft breath whose rhythms he’d committed to memory like verse. The sweet-salt tingling upon his tongue when he bit open into her round shoulder, or licked languorous lines up her pliant thighs, and on, and further…

Max shut his eyes tight and and unlatched his chestplate. It was evident, as the terror subsided, as the rage in him subdued and all that was left was the heated blood surging and his heart thundering, that the inevitable comedown teethed for an outlet. For a release. One which it would not receive.

The armor he wore was trash. It had been from the start, when it was given to him. Evangeline, the hoarder from the Hope, was unconcerned with quality when quantity could be achieved. She neither wasted nor wanted. Max, a parsimonious sort if not by nature than by hard-taught habit, accepted the free gear but made his opinions known. None of it would have withstood that rapt. Here it sagged and split and fell apart.

Her own plate was gouged, horribly, from the tail whip she endured. It turned his stomach to see the metal clawed and caved in so far, so steep. He looked away, again, and shook his head.

“We might find something new for you in Fallbrook,” he called out over his shoulder. He was sick of scraping metal and silence. He was sick of staying quiet. His own voice, a sound he never disliked hearing, would at least fill the room.

There was no response, but neither had he expected one.

“For myself, I—” Well, he might not need anything at all, after his business was finished. He unstrapped the long shinguards from his calves and eased them over gray-socked feet. “I meant to change, in any case,” he said.

A stutter of plate and bedsprings was his only answer.

Why was he speaking to someone who no longer wanted to hear him? Why speak at all? The foolishness of the endeavor, the awkwardness of her indifference, struck him with a distress he swallowed before the mortification could warm his face.

Strange, too, was his reluctance to strip in sight of her, to hide behind this paltry partition. Absurd, when he’d habituated to having her eyes upon him. Studying his mostly-still-firm body with that dark, dreamy intensity. It vibrated there when her gaze roamed over him. When it met with her fingers, cold on his skin, fierce and electric as her look, it had been enough to dry his throat. To empty his lungs.

Her lips were so oddly cool, even her tongue, which should by rights have been warm, when it wound its way across his neck or he tasted it with his own—

He stepped out of the seatguard and let it drop at his feet. A weak tension shuddered through his thigh muscles. Exhausted. Anticipatory.

There was a sharp, clenched-jaw hiss from the bedroom. There was a stifled groan that knocked against his heart with something like dismay. Something like desire.

“Are you all right?” Max stood still in his socks and underclothes and listened.

There was only quiet, yes, but it choked the space behind him, between them, with unperceivable mass and energy. A black hole birthed from mute, manic thoughts. Enveloping everything in its dark vacuum to conceal forever. Consuming the air they might breathe, each word he might speak to her, each gasp or sigh. Gone.

It would engulf them both, paired but severed, and silent forever, if he allowed it to persist. Black fucking holes.

He pushed himself to turn to her, pushed past the partition, to the bed. Evangeline slumped into the spare, flat pillows, against the plastic bedrail painted in imitation iron. Like him, she was free of all her armor, and she shivered in the barest nothings: a once-black brassiere frayed and torn, underwear shamefully thin.

Her skin was a map of marks—inflamed lacerations and contusions, bright and new and abundant. It would be remarkable, he thought, to watch those bruises darken, the scrapes dim and recess, until her body was a negative night sky. Wine-purple stars and crimson comet tails on a canvas of white. He would not have the chance to see that progression.

Her stomach and chest, it appeared, bore no more blight than the rest of her poor body. That armor had been good for something, after all.

The worst of the injuries she examined, clutched her short, soft fingers around and looked doubtfully upon it, the way she might have stared at a plate of food Max offered. It was her knee, swollen and already purpling, a coated, coagulating cut slashed below the cap.

“Do you have anything for that?” He crossed his arms tightly, to stop himself reaching for her. To cover, somehow, his underclothedness, which felt near naked.

She didn’t answer. But he knew her movements. It was a knowledge born of so many nights with this mute mate. Months of watching a near-wordless woman, anticipating her small shifts in want, in her silent communications.

The head nodded a few millimeters down. That meant _no._ If it tilted left, that added _and I don’t care._ To the right, _and I wish it were not so._

Her head dropped right. Her eyes said nothing.

No surprise she set forth with nothing practical. If he were to inspect her overstuffed pack, Max would bet the interstellar title she carried naught but stripped flywheels and useless actuators. It took only a moment to retrieve a near-full tube of Auntie-Biotics from his own collection of pharmaceuticals, and clean gauze.

And then, too, it was but a half-thought for him to decide—when he held the aid items out to her, when he noted her blank stare at his palm, when he navigated by her starfield of bruises and found there was no more than a breath’s distance from talking to touching.

Truthfully, it was sound logic to perform the aid for her. Just as he had done with the hot rash upon her milk-white cheek, before… The undue complication of explanation, of tiresome teaching, was unnecessary. The principle of parsimony. Perhaps that was indeed his nature. _Less_ in opposition to her _more._

It was simplicity to kneel before her, his own knees bare and bored into the deep-set slats of the cold floor. Instinctive to take her leg into his hands and have her thighs spread over the slick, scratchy blanket at the edge of the bed. Familiar to have her set above him, to watch him working toward her will.

The tending of the wound was no great medical matter, for the swelling and the heat worsened what was, mercifully, a surface-level slash. The ointment would heal whatever was ill in her body, and the bandage would compress to pacify her pain.

The only difficulty lay in _him_. In how his focus could not fix upon such a simple task. Instead it meandered toward marveling—with his fingers oiled on her skin, with his eyes hard and certain—her powerful thigh, the thick bones of her knee. She could have played tossball. Law, she would have been glorious on the pitch.

Max made some loose effort not to notice. Not to watch her dark eyes following his touch, not to feel her twitch under his hand, or hear her sigh a sudden, little moan that for all the colony sounded like pleasure rather than pain. Not to smell her sweat, or her hair. Not to see that her legs opened wider around him.

Yet some actions were impossible to ignore. When her hand raised from the bedcover and curled around his jaw with a calm insistence. When those fingers trailed into his hair and tugged. She drew him closer, but she didn’t have to. It was an inevitable intercourse, a drive which nature ennobled and could not be denied.

He kissed her, deeply. His own hands were lost in the black mass of tangles at her neck. A brief, unpleasant thought invaded his mind: that he was like the spawning saltuna swum from its sea home, manic and kyped and insensate with need, only to be caught in her trawl.

But he was not an animal, and he was no one’s dinner—not even hers.

His mouth followed the route of bruises which wound down her body. All her skin, no matter the color, tasted the same. Cool salt and softness. Whatever was left of her underthings shredded away with one tear. The thighs she had opened now closed around him, in a muffle of fog and breath, pulsing blood and wet echo in his ears.

That warmth. Hers. He found it again.

Max had been avoiding her as much as he sought her. Perhaps such a strategy was not necessary. Perhaps he ought only to shun delving into her thoughts, or to imagine whatever her mind held. To prevent himself from feeling anything, just as he had done so profitably, for so many years. It might even be an easier practice, with the distraction of her pleasure. This, her body—which he savored and clung to while she trembled and which was most emphatically not dead—might be enough.

The bedstead rattled and squealed beneath them. The plastic frame fixing the posts which joined this platform together groaned ominously enough, though it held them aloft. In comparison, their floor-flat mattress retained some charm. This was a noisy, coarse approximation of those timeless moments in her quarters. Here, they fucked in battle-sweat and grit and blood. _Human_ , was the word it aroused in him. _Alive_.

Evangeline was alive. Awake. Her black eyes gleamed, her white face and pale lips flushed magenta. Glassy obsidian rock, in a flaming sea-sparked sunset like the Vale. He bit and sucked at the salt on her neck. Why should he want anything more than this? If he could only understand—

_No._ The sense in him would no longer engage with these fancies. Max rolled her onto her side, facing away. A less dangerous position, where he would not fear becoming lost in those black eyes, or frantically kissing her beautiful mouth.

“Mind your knee,” he whispered. He palmed the fullness of her thigh and lifted her legs open to him. Deep within her, he breathed in her smoke-sweat skin, until he shuddered and clawed and cried into her back.

And despite his sensible plans, Max held her tight against his chest, and counted her pulse throbbing there, the pound and echo of her heart beating off-rhythm with his own.

\---

To an observer, if the dauntless nomads of Monarch made as much a point of peeking into every ravaged ruin as did Evangeline’s crew, the scene may have appeared charming, an intimate tableau. If one were adept at seeing only what one wished to see, at fooling oneself into satisfaction, perhaps either of the two people in the ruin’s surprisingly solid bed might speculate things had returned to what they once were, or _could_ return, in time.

But Max could see the before and after as clearly as the present. He could not fool himself successfully—his mind was too acute, too cynical. Nothing had changed, and would not. Not when he would remain what he was, with his plans and the Plan and whatever unforeseen corrective snap would chastise him onto his predicted path after his errand in Fallbrook.

Before that occurred, however, he could lie still and cool against her, and listen to her slow, steady breath. He could steady himself, in her likeness, the one trait he sought to steal from her. Stoic, most of the time, though she was prone to extremes. Unmoved to the point of oblivion.

What occurred between them was only one recess in the silence. It returned, itching and gnawing at Max’s control, and neither had spoken a word to dispel it.

“Thank you,” he said into her hair, blunt and abrupt. Once the words left him, he scrambled to decide just what he was thanking her for.

She looked over her shoulder at him, as much as her posture would allow, with uneasy eyes, with utter confusion.

He focused upon the one round hip in his hand. He coughed. “I believe you saved my life.”

The perplexity faded into blank passivity—he caught it before she turned away again. “Why wouldn’t I?” she mumbled low into his arm, curled around her.

The reasons why not were conceivably infinite. It would be unwise to begin counting them.

“Of course,” he began, massaging his fingers into her cool skin, “I saved yours in turn. I suppose that means we’re even.”

He felt more than saw her shake her head. A slow but insistent _no._ Her hand reached back for his. It was not to hold, as he vaguely hoped, but to peel his fingers from her skin and chuck his hand away.

Evangeline lunged toward the edge of the bed and topped her top half over. If he believed she inched away in annoyance, ready to be rid of him again, his presentiment was pacified by the generous push of her luxurious backside against him, while she rifled and tossed through a heap of her pack-dispersed junk on the floor. Even now, more tired and sore than he’d been since those brutal prison tossball games, he could not help but respond to her soft abundance.

But soon enough, with a thick flip of her wild hair, she faced him again. There was a chipped wooden cube in her hands.

“I stole this.”

Max watched as she turned it over. It was a puzzle box. A shoddily-shaped bauble of pressed scrap cone palm, manufactured and contracted by OSI, inscribed with its icon. These made their way into gratitude gifts given to Board appointees, or pledge supplication premiums to Byzantine tithers. Deceptively intricate, there was no difficulty in solving it—a straightforward turn, lock, and twist.

But the puzzle was not the point for its recipients, he had been given to understand by the elders in the secretariat office. They didn’t even attempt to open its shallow secret. It was _emblematic_ of scholarly science, and to most, an emblem was more effective than that which was objective, or empirical.

“Why?” he asked.

She placed it onto the mattress between them. “I saw it in an office. Stellar Bay.”She sank her head into a flat pillow, her eyes half-closed. “It made me think…” Her low voice drifted into nothing.

_Think of me?_ Max picked up the near-weightless cube and held it up, in the oily fluorescent light. He tapped at a side, eliciting a dull thump against its hollow.

It should have been flattering, to be thought of. Encouraging, if he longed for encouragement, that despite their unhappy parting aboard the Unreliable, he was still part of that fog which passed for her thoughts. But something sour seized at him, and there was no pleasure in it.

Like the box itself, the metaphor was cheap. He was a purposeless puzzle, simple to solve, entirely uninspiring. He looked good on a shelf. He held nothing in his center.

Apt, perhaps, but cheap. Yet he found it hard to believe it was her intention to say as much. It wasn’t in her, that abstract order of insult.

“Thank you. Again.” He set it blindly behind him, on the floor. “I hope it didn’t take up too much room,” he said, settling back into the bed, arms folded back of his head in lieu of a superior bolster. “You carry so much useless trash.”

Max let his voice veer sharp. He let his pricked pride rankle.

Evangeline opened one eye and stared. “Trash isn’t always trash. We need all we can pick up.”

He scoffed, and scolded. Someone had to, when it came to her. “There’s nothing _you_ need in that pile.”

Her look cut like his voice, both eyes open. “Not here.” She spoke with smoky depth, like a dying fire, heat still pulsing beneath all that cold ash. He’d missed listening to her this close. “You wouldn’t believe the things some people throw away.”

She seemed so lucid, like other times he’d offended her, pushed her, yet she was senseless to his ears. And unlike those times, she’d not yet pushed him away. She was comfortable and fearless. This was her bed first, he considered, and he remained here at her pleasure.

“What are you talking about?” he ventured.

After a frustrated sigh, she looked hard into his eyes. “Have you seen a cold ocean? A real shore?” Her gaze roamed over his face, studying it so intently he began to warm. Searching for something in him that he could not bring to the surface, if it even existed.

“That box. Palm wood,” she said. “I haven’t seen it since…” And the words seem to leave her, disappearing into the fog.

Max examined her, in turn. “Are you remembering more?”

Her neck tightened. She fixed upon the empty spot where the puzzle had been. “Maybe.”

_Maybe_ was swiftly supplanting _sorry_ as his most hated word. It led one down into labyrinthine lies. It promised the universe but insured itself against complaint, because it guaranteed nothing at all. He began to feel as though he’d spent his life in quest of _maybes._

There was nothing to show for his life’s work but remorse and revenge. And that last as yet unsatisfied, but so temptingly near it was like a scent on the air. Like raw meat. 

_Maybe_ was not enough to tangle him in Evangeline’s net this time. Her pleasure wouldn’t hold him from his path any longer.

Max untangled his legs from the bedcovers, swept away the puzzle box with a socked foot, and stood. “I’m going to shower now,” he said into the air, “and then I’ll be going to Fallbrook.” He dictated as to a clipboard-carrying subordinate, not to a sometime lover or a peer, much less a ship’s captain upon whom one depended for food and flight. But, in his present state of mind, he could not be deterred.

He put hand to the toiletries in his orderly pack almost without looking. “I’ll send word to the Unreliable to come for you here.”

“We’ll go together.” An order, it seemed, from the captain. Of course she was not aware yet he was removing himself from her crew. From her life.

He meant to say _You don’t have to_ , as though any choice or reluctance had been presented to him. It would have been polite, and politeness was a useful tool on rare occasions. Unfortunately, what left his mouth was, in fact, _You shouldn’t._ A phrase with a very different meaning. A phrase like fuel to contrarian stubbornness, to defiant desires which would work toward anyone’s opposition.

So he was certain Evangeline would follow him into the township, certain what he would do there, and uncertain about the fate of everything else in the universe.

\---

The shower was just-warm only from the sun beating the exterior pipes, which poured in water as gritty and sulfurous as the rest of the world.

Max changed again. This time, he didn’t care if she watched, considering recent intimacies. Evangeline leaned back against piled-up pillows, bandaged knee bent in the air, ashtray balanced in her lap, smoking and watching him slip on his trousers, button his buttons. It was still a most inflaming feeling. He could not deny that.

This time, he wore the near-pristine, pressed cassock he’d taken careful measure to fold and keep in good condition, wrapped in papers at the bottom of his traveling pack.

He bypassed what he considered a costume: the gray workshirt, brown pants and suspenders, which he kept for blending into a crowd. Those he wore to emulate any poor laborer. He was familiar enough, not only from parishioners. His father wore the exact ones. Point of fact, he could not remember him wearing any other outfit at all, although memory crafted story at times—even in a mind as keenly analytical as his own.

No, the only difference he could denote was that Samuel De Soto’s only clothes were salt-stained, white from the mines. His skin grew dry from it. Chalky. It never seemed to wash out entirely. That was what he remembered most of the man, other than his silence. The white dust which followed him everywhere.

Those bright blue, unblemished vestments, on the other hand—Max wanted to wear _those_ in Fallbrook. He wanted to be seen in them. He wanted everyone to know exactly who, and what, they were dealing with.

And if Reginald Chaney had any shame at all, he’d piss down his leg and weep at the sight of the vicar’s approach.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which one look upends the Vicar.

When the clown tumbles into the tub, I laugh. Terran history is full of clowns and tubs; at first, it seems that's all there is, but you learn to see beneath the cosmic costumes.  
— Sonya Dorman

Fallbrook teemed with gamblers and grifters, who appeared at ease in the crowded card dens and smoky saloons. But there were also Byzantine tourists and triflers. Their callous, crude laughter, their sniffy scorn of server-bots and SubLight strong-arms alike—it was clear indication they considered themselves untouchable by outpost anarchy.

Perhaps it was true, and their bits made the difference. They were stars in a serial, and the rest only extras to pad the scene. They had no idea how sorely they stuck out.

Max, in clear contrast, felt the difference between himself and Monarch’s recusant rabble as soon as he walked through the gate. He had not come here to have a good time.

Evangeline, who’d changed into scuffed brown leathers and a loose-holstered pistol, slung low around her alluring hips, at least looked the part. She kept up with Max’s march down the pitted, winding road through town, the main drag edged by bars and betting-halls, buffeted by stomping songs and raspy laughter. Her wide-eyed wandering set her apart as much as himself, for she craned her neck to gawk through every thrown-open door.

Chaney’s trail was not hard to pick up. He was unbearably stupid, after all. He left his pre-fab open and his whereabouts clear, from an artless note which pointed right to him.

Some people never left prison, it seemed. Their instinct for privacy was annihilated by years of routine exploitation and illiberty. It hardly required masterful detection to track one so spiritless.

And how should Max feel that such a person—witless and weak as a caged chicken—managed to trick him? Oh, it was good to remember it now. Now was the time to feel that rage rise to a boil.

The sour sun sank in the sky, shadowing the township. Its spare, weak strings of lights, which moreso twitched than twinkled from bar to bar, hissed on in the growing dark.

The note said Chaney had gone gold-panning. The absolute imbecile. If there were any valuable resource to be found here, SubLight owned it and SubLight would claim it. There was nothing in the river for Chaney but bug bites and spillage sickness. But, Max supposed, he found a little freedom in it. A sad, unprofitable hobby, yet it was his own.

If it were anyone else, Max would respect that. Chaney, though. He took Max’s freedom from him. He sent Max, purposefully, down a heretical, hubristic _maybe_ which only served to trap him. Was this folly fated? In a sense. Perhaps the misstep Max made was refraining to thrash Chaney insensible upon his initial offer. That act alone may have snapped his path into correction far earlier.

Then he would never have lobbied for the Edgewater vicarage. He would never have wasted his time hunting down an unreadable tome. He would never have met—

Max glanced to his side. There she was, her long, black cloud of hair bouncing with each step, like electrified air. Her face a cool stare, straight ahead now. They must have appeared comical together. The prim vicar, and his hard-bitten bodyguard. He couldn’t care less how it looked. Anyone would see just how prim he was soon, if they bothered to watch.

He did not regret encountering Evangeline. Nor enlisting her services to find Bakonu’s journal, nor embarking as crew on the Unreliable, nor… anything else. He knew that now, in the face of leaving it all behind. Fated outcomes were often far less pleasing in the moment than those he’d had with her.

The Plan pinched and dragged one onto his own course, in his own time, no matter what one asked of it. Sometimes the lessons for children— _The Plan’s path may appear askew but it is the only way to walk_ —became more sensible as one matured.

But a man must take action. A man must tame and triumph, and no longer consent to be caged.

It became plain, as they left the bars behind, and the town emptied into a low clearing, why SubLight staked out this parcel of land from the poisonous leavings of Monarch. The high cliffside surround shaded Fallbrook from the caustic sun. They hid the buildings—and their contents—from orbital surveillance. And the river, the first unsulfurous water Max had seen or smelled since Stellar Bay’s sea, hemmed in everything with a dim, cool cushion.

Monarch was salted and sour, Stellar Bay was its dumping grounds for oil and ash, but Fallbrook… It was nearly livable. If one thrived among thieves, or required a risky hideaway for extra-legal activities, one might do worse than this.

Chaney did not deserve such an agreeable situation.

They rounded the curve in the cobbled road, which decayed and made a hasty demise into tall grass. The only way forward was into the river, down the shallows, and into the cavern. He would be there, hiding.

Max hovered one foot above the water and hesitated, despite his designs, disinclined to soak his shoes and sully the skirting of his clean vestments. Evangeline, with the impulsive indulgence that was sometimes her way, hopped both boots into the river with a _plunk_. The spraying splash caught him in its arc.

She dragged him out of his dawdling. The space for doubt. He stepped in. The cold seeped around his toes.

The cliff walls were carpeted with drooping, soggy mushrooms and blankets of dry-tipped moss, footed in crumbling mud-cake banks. Max slipped on river-worn pebbles, and slogged against the flow of water. Like the saltuna, upstream. All instinctive defiance.

The last of the day’s sun filtered through deep, high fissures in the rock. It glowed around its pits and edges, and dappled the water at their feet. It flung a fading glare upon Evangeline’s face. She blinked into the light, her lips pursed as she lumbered upriver.

She took hold of Max’s arm. Her soft fingers gripped half-round his wrist, to steady herself. It did not steady him. He no longer cared that she was there, or that she might involve herself, or intervene.

Because when he turned from following the dying light from the rock to her soft cheek, he stared down the riverway into the darkening alley, toward the mouth of a cave tunnel where the stream rushed on. And there, sat against the black shadows, feet in the same water, alone and hunched dumbly over the mud shore, was Reginald Chaney.

Max wrenched his arm from her grasp and walked faster.

In the ever-analytical part of his mind—the one which deconstructed dialectic and unspooled logical truths from the Architect’s universal weaving—he retained some distant, dispassionate understanding of the moment, and what it meant. He _had_ been lying to himself. That mindspace constructed a vision of him which was contained and controlled, which needed only distraction or diversion—a welcome one, like Evangeline, or the objectless onslaught of a gunfight in the ruins—to keep the dark depths in their cell.

But no marauder, no raptidon, could suffice when it came to the blood he wanted to spill. The payback he wanted to exact.

He sloshed to the cave mouth, to the mud bank, and climbed up to dry land. The fool below him hadn’t yet noticed, consumed with his panning plate, dirt-hardened hands raking through the root and brush of the shoreline.

“Reggie.” He spoke with cold precision.

Chaney’s shoulders twitched at the sound. The pan, wet and empty, fumbled from his shaking hands and stuck in the mud. He scanned up slowly, and wiped his palms on soil-stained pants.

“Oh, hey. The vicar. What are you doing here?” He asked with all the magnanimity of a host opening the door to a surprise guest. But the tremble in his voice, and the tight strain in his throat, gave him away.

Max stretched his fingers against his thighs. He curled and tightened each hand into a hard fist.

“Don’t ask stupid questions,” he said.

Then he leveled one fierce kick into Chaney’s ribs.

The man sputtered and slipped to his knees, sliding in the mud. The spill lowered him further, and gave Max all the leverage. He seized at Chaney’s slick-oiled hair and shook him upright. He struck the weak jaw with his knee—it was a hollow, bloody thud. He slapped the swelling cheek. The shock of it stung his palm senseless.

Max snatched his head backward to look him in the eyes, if the coward would.

“You made a fool of me. No one gets away with that.”

A cruel throw to the eye, one to the nose, snapped Chaney’s head back, loose on his neck. The impact echoed up Max’s arm, electric and sharp. Simple physics, exchange of energy.

He didn’t think these things, in that Scientism-suffused section of his brain which still operated on logical reflex. He _felt_ them. The blood smear warm on his knuckles. The crack of his own bones against Chaney’s.

He fed the dark hole inside him, but it would not be filled. It only grew, and hungered.

Chaney mumbled _please_ through shattered teeth and cried _stop_ with split lips. He bargained between blows with gold he surely didn’t have. He offered up other prey for Max to target: some Scyllian hermit who could read the book.

Max ignored it all. None of it would solve this problem. Not even killing Chaney with his bare hands would satisfy him. Not for long.

Of all the lies he ever told, this was the most monstrous: that he had ever been different from this bare, brutal animal, the one his parents could not command away. The one who thrived in Tartarus. The one he hated.

Rage deafened him, blinded. There were only snatches of blurred sound and dim sight. Everything fading blue as the sun died. Far-off laughter, over Chaney’s muffled sobs.

He wrenched the man’s limp body closer by the collar and in the half-second heave it took, he saw Evangeline.

She watched from the river. Made no move to stop him. Made no move at all, except that her eyes widened in a dazed stare, and her full mouth parted in soft awe.

He saw every detail in that ephemeral moment as clear and measured as a slow-shot aether scene. Her shoulders shuddered in a long sigh, and her look may have been stunned, but it was not blank.

It was incongruous and perhaps insane. It was writ in large letters now, where he only ever had hints. There was a tender reverence cast over her face while she looked at him. A gaze which yearned and wondered. Loved.

Somehow Max knew what it meant. But he could not comprehend that it was aimed at him.

He let go of the stained shirt. Chaney slumped over Max’s soggy shoes. Blood bubbled from his broken nose. Max shoved him off with indifferent kick, and he sank down the shore. There was nothing left in him but red-stained sweat and tears.

It was an acute triangle they made at the river’s edge: the two prisoners, panting and spattered in the mud, and Evangeline with the water flowing around her feet, with that devotion in her eyes, with a ghost of a smile.

Max left both of them behind.

He walked furiously along the shoreline, then directionless once he reached the wild weeds where the road picked up again. Chaney may have been dead, or dying, but it was of no consequence to him. It was a thought he repeated after every curdled pinch in his stomach, every aching throb in his knuckles. _It was of no consequence._

What his mind spun upon was Scylla, Scylla… Like grit between his teeth, it stuck and shivered. To allow one of Chaney’s deceptions to once again compel him to action was madness. It was only more _maybes_ , more unknowns. More hope to bait him, like raw sprat to that loathsome canid onship.

He elbowed between drunk stumblers and just-landed oglers, the street growing crowded and boozy as night approached.

“Cap! Over here!” A familiar voice slurred from a saloon terrace into the throng. He searched the rows of jumbled benches and boards and soon spotted Ms. Ramnarim-Wentworth, arrived as she’d promised, with Millstone, Miss Holcomb, and the doctor. They circled a tall table cramped with bottles and overfilled ashtrays.

But they weren’t calling for Max. He turned around and— _there_. Evangeline pursued him, and captured him. And now she fixed him in the middle of the street, revelers and rubberneckers streaming past, with that gentle look in her dark eyes.

She came closer. “You lied to me,” she said, a soft smile haunting her lips. It was not a censure or full of offense. It was wondrous, and pleased. As though it were the first good news she’d heard in a lifetime.

“Yes.” Max’s throat was raw and ragged. He trembled with seething comedown, and a hunger so vicious it had become numb. “I had to.”

He was driven by this, by revenge, by his search for the truth. It was the method which ordered his life. All other paths were chaos. Nothing else mattered. Not the erratic brain fog of a lonely, half-crazed woman. Not even the foolish, sentimental spots in his own heart.

Those were easy enough to armor over. All it had ever required before was discipline. The contemplation and detachment his faith provided. It was the only way he knew to navigate this world.

Evangeline blinked softly and stroked his cheek with the flat of her fingers. His jaw bucked. “I understand. The lie.” Her hand pulled back, stained red.

He sputtered and backed away from her touch. _“What?_ No. You don’t.”

She babbled nonsense. She could not possibly understand any of it. She had some blurry, wrongheaded notion of who he was. How could she look at him like this, at his lowest, the most desperate and vile he’d been in years, and refuse to look away?

If she had any insight into what he was, she should be furious at his falseness, his futility.

He wiped at the spatter and sweat on his face with both hands. For a short-lived, sane moment, all was black and quiet. When he opened his eyes again, it was still there: the turbulent town and the traffic and talk which flowed on like the river. The woman he fathomed less the longer he knew her. And his hands, empty of everything but blood.

Max swept them clean upon the once-spotless cassock and stared at her. “Now you know the truth. Why don’t you have the sense to leave me alone?”

He thought she had done so before they landed on this Law-forsaken moon. It no longer mattered that such a force inside him wanted the opposite. All he ever wanted, or wished for, became poisoned.

In the end, if he gave into his worst instincts and went to Scylla, the same pattern would follow. The Path unfolded. But it would be the end of that particular path. He would see to it.

Evangeline’s affection faded and deadened, like her eyes. Blank and black, they fell to the ground between them.

He was sick of the dead in her. How it echoed the hollow inside him. “Why are you like this?” he spat. “What are you?”

In an instant, her eyes flashed up, a heated blood-brown. Angry and awake, as though she could turn her blankness off and on by choice. “And what are you?”

“To you?” A laugh caught in his throat, pained and absurd. “A crewman. A gunhand. Your _spiritual counsel_. Occasional bedmate. Was there meant to be more?”

Her mouth shut slightly askew. Her nostrils flared, one more red than the other. He noticed every detail. It was his own fault for wanting her to want more. For expecting her expectations, though they never materialized. For fearing those same desires he dreamed of.

She said _I’m sorry_. It was near-mute mumble. It enraged him. She was sorry for what he alone had done. If he had not already had this blood on his hands, had not already felt the tremorous rush of violence and pain, how sweet it was, how disgustingly it stirred him—he could not say what he might have done.

But Max was able to diffuse this particular rage. Because he, too, was sorry. Sorrier than he had been in so many years. Since he was a young man, with disappointed parents.

Sorry to have lied about what he was, and what he thought he wanted. To have kissed her slowly, or grinned into her hair and sighed while he held her close against his skin. Sorry to have taken those small pleasures while he was able.

Sorry to have this useless exchange, in full view of the entire uncaring town, and worse, the Unreliable’s complement, who surely stared in scrutiny—when all he wanted to do was either love her and forget everything else, or leave her. And forget her.

He said none of those things. His silence was, finally, enough to make her leave.

He stood in the middle of the road, and followed the black mass of her hair, until it disappeared in the dark.

Max staggered to the dirt side path, swarming with outdoor drunks. Above the cliffside, up a dismal elevator shaft, he sighted the Unreliable in dock. He made his way to the lift, for lack of anywhere else to go.

He did not feel like a person. Like anyone living. Some thorny, malicious thought sparked itself in his mind: _Living is overrated, anyway_. Perhaps he really was like her, half a human, unable to function—

No. Evangeline was not like that. That was the reflection in the black mirror he put up between them. He saw all his own cracks and flaws.

It was not her. It was him.

\---

In the succeeding days, the ship sat still in its spot, and Max once more had the thing to himself, free of human crew, just as it had been in Edgewater. The humans passed their shore leave in town and had not seen fit to return. So the unhuman beings now owned the Unreliable, and they made as much noise and nuisance—more, perhaps, than even Millstone could.

Where ADA had, in those first days, been aggrieved and solemn—as much as an artificial intelligence could evince emotional approximation—now she was gregarious. She watched, and let one know she was watching. The SAM cleaner spewed his rote reproaches and commercials to no one. And the nameless canid gnawed and slobbered its way through every room, leaving its stinking signature where it pleased. 

A newer, more severe desperation clawed in Max. He enlisted ADA’s terminal to investigate the outpost mining camps, and ignored her dry recriminations, the questions about her Captain. He conducted covert approaches to Fallbrook in search of transport. The idea of Scylla swelled in his mind, to wild heights and consequence. He had to reach it.

In the township, he wore the same sullied vestments, the same mud-blotched boots, and a burgeoning beard. The cassock stretched from wear, and his single-minded motivation, his disinclination to eat, or sleep. Vaguely, he surmised he must have looked as wretched as he felt, though he avoided mirrors.

Desperation, as an outward sign, did nothing to improve his chances of gaining a seat to Scylla on anyone’s ship. Nor did the symbol of his clothing—he’d over-assumed the novelty of a preacher in a place like Fallbrook, for he saw at least three others in the gambling halls and taprooms.

No one was going to Scylla. Or no one wanted to take him. The same outcome concluded, no matter the cause.

After one more unsuccessful solicitation, Max boarded the rusted, jittery lift to the ship dock and clung to the side rail, as the cage lurched upward, with sweating palms. Inside the Unreliable’s airlock, he rubbed at his aching, sulfur-sore eyes, until he heard the noise.

There was a deep bleat coming from the hold, a wet groan. A metallic stomp and shudder. Laughter.

He crept around the vent seal and stepped downship to lean against the cargo bay doors.

Cows. There were wooly cows in cargo. He could not imagine why.

Three—no, _four,_ shaggy and shuffling over the hay at their feet. Some of the crew were there, too, enjoying the new arrivals. Miss Holcomb, who nurtured anything which wasn’t human, carded her hand through the long, knotted wool of one restless cow and murmured to soothe it. Millstone tapped at the horns of another, and jumped to avoid its snot-filled snort. The canid weaved among their legs, sniffing at their tails, at the clumps of cow shit on the floor.

And Evangeline. She stood at one’s side, stroking her pale hand down its muzzle. Her black tangle of hair nearly matched the cow’s. Her sweet, blank expression was similar enough.

She nodded when it nodded, as though they could converse. Perhaps they might. That would not be so surprising.

It was absolutely fucking absurd. It was so beautiful and ridiculous, he nearly smiled.

Until she looked up, and met his stare. He watched her blankness tighten into pain. Then the same tenderness in her he saw in the river. Then, nothing.

She left the cow, and then the room, making her way slowly up the hold ladder. He followed all her movements with tired eyes. With a hungry heart. 

“Of course it’s you.” Millstone made his way to the door. “It’s like every time you walk into a room, you make it worse. Wish you’d just leave,” he said, folding his arms. There was a threat at the bottom of it. _And if you don’t…_

There was nothing this half-witted hooligan could realistically do to threaten him. But neither did he wish to raise the boy’s ire. Not this time.

“I _am_ leaving,” Max told him, as placatingly as he could manage, while he stepped fully into the hold. “As soon as I book transport, you’ll be rid of me.”

Miss Holcomb continued her useless combing of the cow, and pretended not to listen.

“Ain’t soon enough.” Millstone ran a hand hastily through his floppy hair and glanced back to the hold ladder, but Evangeline was already gone. He seemed to throb with backed-up bitterness. “She ain’t the one who’s got something wrong with her, you know. She’s got a sight more sense than you. Why can’t you just let her be?”

_I have_. Max said it to himself, no matter how much he wished it were untrue. After Fallbrook, truth was flimsy and impermanent. He no longer cared whether she was irreparably glitched. No longer sure which of them was the more damaged. 

The issue was not so simple. Truly, it never had been. But how could a lummox like Millstone be expected to understand the intricacies of their entanglement, when it was everything Max could do to hold the threads together in his own mind?

He sighed and blinked his burning eyes. “Son, you’d better just keep quiet.”

“Nah.” The boy’s jaw tightened. “Don’t think I will. I knew you weren’t doing nothing in your room but crankin’ into the infinite, or whatever you preachers do. Fondle your nethers to the sound of your own voice.”

“Felix, _stop.”_ Miss Holcomb hopped over a hay pile and tried to pull Millstone back, but he shook off her hand.

_Stop_ , Max echoed in his head. _This won’t end well_.

“Then Boss took a fool notion to do it for you,” he went on, “but you’re such an ass you couldn’t even—”

The suckerpunch Max pitched cracked Millstone in his crooked nose. It stung Max’s bruised knuckles and jammed his elbow with a thick, internal thud. It was the first thing he’d felt in days.

The boy faltered for only a moment. Then he lunged, like the Back Bay sprat he was, feral and snarling.

It seemed the floor hit Max, instead of the other way around. The unforgiving steel, the bolted seams, struck him breathless. He choked for air, with Millstone’s weight bearing him down, with his furious punches pummeling around Max’s ribs.

All Max could do was kick. He swung at the boy’s shins and kneed his groin. At least one hit connected, with enough force to make Millstone curse him, to break his grip, and shove him off.

Somewhere in the surreality surrounding them, Miss Holcomb fretted and called for calm. The canid shouted its hoarse bark, without end.

Max had no opportunity to attack. The boy tackled him again, this time clear-sighted, and his throws landed: at his temple, at his mouth.

Remotely, through the pain, Max registered and catalogued the details. This was an eminently survivable fight. The boy had explosive strength without much follow-through. He’d tried to tell him that once—that his swing must come from the body, not the arm. And here he felt the effect of his lessons ignored. Shallow punches, easy jabs. An unguarded side left open.

Max drove one long, hard hit there, at his stomach. The boy groaned and rolled onto his knees, clutching his gut.

If Max could have filled his lungs to breathe, he might have laughed. As it was, he gulped for air and barely managed to get to his feet. “You see,” he coughed out, panting, “if you had listened to me…”

He took one step to loom over the boy. His foot never stopped. 

It slid, his heel skating over a smear of cow shit. He was falling before he even knew it, and his sore hands smacked the steel floor. Then his knees. The metal rang out, the sound coloring the agony—it knocked through him, drumming his brain.

Max let his forehead rest upon the cold floor while his lungs clawed for air, and the floor’s blood-metal stink, the waste-strewn hay and animal reek, assaulted each breath.

A shadow blackened his periphery. He dragged his head to view, with one eye, Millstone wobbling. The boy held one arm tight around his surely-tender ribs. Blood dripped from his nose, through patchy fuzz at his chin, and he spat it onto the floor.

“Fuck you, Max.”

A succinct summation. Max felt the boy’s stomps as he lurched out of the hold, but he didn’t bother to watch. He rolled, gingerly, onto his back, where the hard tracklights glared at him from the ceiling.

Then another, softer shadow blocked the light. “Come on, Mister Vicar.” Miss Holcomb held out her hand to him.

He accepted her aid. She hauled him up, and tested a tentative effort to knock the hay from his hair.

“You better go see Ellie about—” The mechanic gestured around his face, his body, where everything felt bruised and inflamed. “All of that.”

Despite her apparent qualifications, Dr. Fenhill was not quite the last person he desired to see, but she neared the end of the list. “I’ll be fine.”

Miss Holcomb only sighed, with the exhausted air of someone too used to people who refused to care for themselves. Perhaps she had some intimate understanding of the subject.

She swept more hay from his shoulder. “This probably don’t get said too often,” she began softly, “but… I think Felix is right.”

His scowl was a natural response, but even he would have prevented it at that moment, if he’d been able. She drew back her hand from him, daunted, though she continued to speak.

“I mean—about the Captain.” She bit at her lip, her thoughts obviously requiring some effort to formulate properly. “Captain’s fine the way she is. Maybe— maybe she don’t need changing.” Then she offered him a confused shrug.

“No.” His throat clenched. What the crew saw in Fallbrook was a one-sided quarrel, a bully and his target, the pathetic invective of an ineffectual failure aimed at someone who deserved none of it. And all that was true. Max deserved the blame, more than they could possibly unleash upon him, with words or blows.

But they did not see the entirety of what passed between himself and Evangeline: in her quarters, in their bed, in that ruined prefab, in the river. They did not know her the way he did, or perhaps didn’t—which meant that he alone was consumed by her mystery, and lost to himself. They had not seen the way she looked at him that day. They couldn’t measure what it had done to him.

“There’s nothing wrong with her,” he agreed. _Only me_.

“Nor you neither,” Miss Holcomb said eagerly, with an uncanny quickness. “Maybe none of us need to change, you know? We’re just… good the way we are.”

Max scoffed, gently, and wiped the blood from his lip with the back of his hand. “You’re not supposed to be the one giving _me_ counsel.”

“Aw, well…” Her eyes dropped to the floor. She stuffed her hands in the frayed pockets of her overalls. “You were kind to me, when I was all in knots over Junlei. I appreciated that.”

The Lost Hope. He didn’t remember a word he said that night. He had been thinking only of Evangeline.

“This…” He shook his head. “It isn’t quite the same thing.”

The mechanic gave him a doubtful smile. “If you say so, Vicar.”

To their backs, the wooly cows continued their slow shuffle, their muted mooing.

“You’d better clean those cuts,” she told him. “And, uh, your pants. And… everything.”

Miss Holcomb was correct. Everything about him was unclean. Wet river soil and blood coated his cassock, and now the tails, and his trousers, were smeared with cow dung. He didn’t want to imagine what had found its way into his hair.

Max found a clear spot upon the floor, near the hold entrance, and slipped off his boots. He carried them through the door, and the canid followed him out, snapping at his socks, as he made his way slowly, barefoot and shit-covered, to the bathroom.

The SAM unit was programmed to detect stains within a certain proximity. It targeted Max, and stalked him through the ship, readying its detergent sprays and whirring brushes. Its overly cheerful recorded voice blared at him: _“Filthy! Filthy!”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's quote is from Sonya Dorman's short story "When I Was Miss Dow," which is one of my favorites ever, [you should definitely read it](https://archive.org/stream/Galaxy_v24n05_1966-06#page/n153/mode/2up), it's way better than mine (and shorter!).


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